Hong Kong Cinema

[TechnicolorAcid]

I think it’s only ever been released in OOP DVDs if they’re even legitimate.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

There's no legitimate DVD. There's a whole universe of Taiwanese kid-martial-artist films from the '80s and '90s that wouldn't exist at all anymore without bootlegs; I guess there's no interest in preserving and restoring such déclassé artifacts, or the rights and elements are too difficult to work with. It's kind of a shame, since there's a fair amount of invention mixed in with the fart jokes and a lot of Taiwanese millennials have fond memories of catching them on TV or VCD.

[Mr Sausage]

Blind Detective (Johnnie To, 2013)

I wasn't into this one. It's so manic and arch, with endless screaming and failing and dancing and everything. I just wished everyone would calm down for a second. Nothing is especially funny, and even worse, the film rests on a strain of misogynist humour I found increasingly unbearable. Sammi Cheng is a pretty and charismatic actress, but the film spends most of its time torturing her for humour. It's pretty hard to buy the romance angle when Andy Lau's detective spends most of his time forcing her to submit to painful and degrading acts like being slapped repeatedly, getting tatooed, cutting her arms with an exacto blade, being told that she's too ugly for him to even consider dating (which the fact that she's actually pretty does nothing to mitigate), all while Lau drains her of funds and generally acts like her best quality is that she's rich. Like, why is everything so unpleasant? It's a romantic comedy for christsakes. I liked this a lot less than Fulltime Killer. A loud, tedious, regressive comedy that, while handsomely shot, wasn't stylish enough to distract from its annoying material.

[Michael Kerpan]

Mr S -- Is this your first Jonnie To "fail"?

(I've only watched this one once -- so my own memories are vague -- but I don't recall disliking it).

[Mr Sausage]

Mr S -- Is this your first Jonnie To "fail"?

(I've only watched this one once -- so my own memories are vague -- but I don't recall disliking it).

Huh, for some reason I never saw this post.

Yeah, it's the first outright fail for me. I wasn't much into Fulltime Killer, but it had plenty of redeeming qualities. Blind Detective, tho', just got more and more annoying as it went along. I was glad when it ended. Just not my kind of thing I guess.

[Michael Kerpan]

Well, if you keep plugging you are sure to find at least a FEW more (said, having seen 40 or so). Still haven't seen Wu Yen yet, right. (One of my faves -- but probably not a universally shared opinion).

[therewillbeblus]

I haven't seen that much Johnnie To, but I think probably a pretty eclectic mix (Fat Choi Spirit and Election were largely forgettable, Throw Down and PTU were very memorable, but I probably only liked the former enough to see again), and while I know there are plenty of wonderful grimier genre classics I have yet to see from him, Romancing in Thin Air is clearly the best of the lot so far. I'm not sure how to praise it except that it takes the labyrinthine romance-mystery epic and whittles it down to economic narrative meditations and profundity that feel calculated and earn sentiment. And yet the film doesn't feel 'doctored' - it's fluid and graceful and interesting, and it's not hurried, as To is clearly very interested in what he's doing in this project too. The 'tweak' on the genre is fun, where instead of digging up history that's meaningful to a couple, there's forward momentum occurring as the past is a meaningful barrier to active love for one. The grand gesture of what the other-focused (now free of egocentric addiction) partner does in the narrative mirrors that of what the medium can offer us all, and it's one of the more effective uses of self-reflexivity I've seen in this realm. Anyways, strong rec.

[Mr Sausage]

More Category III to Rot Your Brain


Her Vengeance (Lam Nai-Choi, 1988)

A grotesque, over-the-top rape revenge film in which a gang of low lifes assault a nightclub worker and leave her with a venereal disease (the doctor manages to diagnose AIDS—not HIV, AIDS--with only a pelvic exam, and goes on to list a wide range of symptoms that have nothing to do with AIDS. I’m going to assume it’s a subtitle issue). So the traumatized woman heads out for revenge. It’s a remake of an earlier Shaw Brothers movie, The Kiss of Death. That one was more a martial arts revenge film, while this is pure CAT III exploitation. One thing that makes these HK exploitation films watchable is the goofy extremity--and the mugging and gurning straight into the camera here does much to soften the ugly content. At no point does reality enter into things. Shing Fui-On in particular gets a number of ridiculous shots of his face, including a rather creative reveal where a scooter’s side mirror is knocked aside to reveal his slavering, twitchy mug. And of course there’s the wheelchair-fu courtesy of Lam Ching-Ying. This isn’t much of a movie. It’s unfocused and over-stuffed: it’s not enough that the gangsters assaulted the woman, they also happen to be the same people who killed her father and blinded her sister at some point in the past; and there’s a heist subplot involving them, plus a love story involving the woman and some dude who keeps showing up, plus another subplot involving the woman working at her friend’s dive bar in Hong Kong. It’s only 90 minutes, but the woman doesn’t even get to her revenge until almost an hour in. And unlike many of the later CAT III classics, whose style could have an unexpected artistry and energy, this one is visually undistinguished. The only bit of style in the thing is the lame decision to use red lighting whenever the woman gets her revenge—because she’s seeing red, get it? It has the usual forward momentum and wild narrative and tonal shifts characteristic of HK cinema, and some of those wilder flights of invention needed to make something like this memorable (the climax goes all Home Alone in the craziest way, including an 80s montage of people building traps). If the movie’d had more of that level of energetic nuttiness, I would’ve...liked is the wrong word. Gotten more out of it, I guess? But I think my favourite moment was another subtitle bit: one of the characters is sliced to ribbons with a straight razor and her friend grabs her and asks: “Susan, how are you?” She’s doin’ great, Hsao!


Daughter of Darkness (Lai Kai-Ming, 1993)

Follows the pattern set by Doctor Lamb and The Untold Story: a grotesque crime is revealed, the bumbling police investigate, and at the end there’s a confession scene where we finally witness the crime in explicit detail. The movie tries to distinguish itself by pushing things even further: not only is the exploitation even more gross, with endless scenes of softcore sex, rape, incest, and murder, but the comedy is also pushed to extreme and grotesque limits, with the movie finding it especially funny to see corpses defiled. The tonal whiplash is especially jarring: even within a scene we’ll jump from horror one moment to slapstick gross-out comedy the next. The film is trying so hard to offend that it undermines itself, everything just seems so fake and insincere. Anthony Wong is here, but surprisingly he’s not playing the awful scumbag, he’s the comic relief police inspector. He does get plenty of gross things to do, like molest corpses, but it’s all for laughs (tho’ it’s hard to see what audience would laugh at someone testing for rape by smelling a corpse’s genitals). It’s interesting how often in Cat III films the police are shown to be at best incompetent, and at worst profoundly abusive of their authority. How to interpret this given how often these abuses are played for humour, and when they aren’t, serve only to generate sympathy for a criminal that the film otherwise does its level best to make the worst human being in existence? At least here the criminal is genuinely sympathetic, being a young woman who murders her abusive family. Like Red to Kill (also starring Lily Chung), there’s a real social issue here, but done with so much inauthenticity and leering enjoyment that it’s apparent the filmmakers don’t much care. There are long scenes of the father spying on his naked daughter all shot from his point of view so we can enjoy the nudity as much as him, followed by long murder scenes shot similarly, also for our leering enjoyment. Lily Chung’s victim is sexualized endlessly by the camera, and in a movie ostensibly about improper and abusive sexualizing of young women! But the movie’s upfront about its aims; it doesn’t have much pretense to a serious examination of familial abuse, just a low desire to milk absolutely everything, sympathy included. One more CAT III film whose comicbook outrageousness and unapologetic prurience nearly turns it into black comedy (another good subtitle bit: the mom comes home to see the daughter’s killed her father and cries: “Bitch, what?!”). An uncut version is pretty hard to find, so I had to watch a bad VHS rip.


Robotrix (Jamie Luk, 1991)

My first Amy Yip movie. Yip became famous for a brand of teasing softcore erotica called Yiptease, where she’d come to the brink of showing nudity and no further. Well, that and her enormous chest. Instead of the vile exploitation of the two films above, this is more an erotic sci-fi comedy, somewhere between I Love Maria and Robocop/The Terminator. There’s still sleazy content, like robots raping people to death, so we’re solidly in exploitation territory. It’s just not as relentlessly obscene and filthy as the big CAT III stuff. The plot is made up as it goes along. It starts with a scientist transferring his consciousness to a robot in order to kidnap a visiting Sultan’s son, but after that he mostly spends his time raping prostitutes to death while the cops try to catch him using a pair of robot beauties. It’s a mess, and despite some of the nutty plot devices, really dull. Little happens besides frat boy comic scenarios and lame romantic interludes, occasionally punctuated by a bit of sleaze or action. Not even a tenth as creative as I Love Maria.


A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (Bosco Lam, 1994)

An erotic comedy that sometimes throws in scenes of torture, I guess to distinguish itself? Cash in on the more extreme end of CAT III popularity? Nothing too explicit, tho’. For the most part the film is merely kinky, luxuriating in the extravagances of Ming Dynasty sexuality among the nobility. It’s the story of a young maid and her former master who are accused of poisoning the maid’s husband, Ol’ Donkey Dick Got, with an aphrodisiac that made his penis explode, told in retrospect at the trial. There are few things that interest me less than sexploitation and Chinese comedy, so imagine my surprise at how enjoyable this was. I’m sure it’s partly the effect of having seen so many grim, rape obsessed CAT IIIs that it was a welcome relief to have things be consensual. But mostly the film is just so spirited. It whizzes by with such style and energy, and the juvenile sex comedy, surprising to say, is actually charming. But the best scene in the movie is a non-sequitur, a random wuxia parody where an acrobatic sword fight between a man and a woman turns into a flying, spinning, digging(!) sex battle, as the combatants furiously try to outdo each other in sexual prowess while soaring through the trees and even burrowing under the ground to the strains of the Once Upon a Time in China theme. It’s goofy, bizarre, and irrepressibly fun. Much like the movie as a whole, actually, except for the torture in the last third, although at least the methods have some, er, historical creativity and fantastical exaggeration, and are presented as tragic and evidence of a corrupt system rather than a grimy, horrid pleasure for the audience as in, say, Emanuelle in America, another sexploitation film infamous for torture scenes. So, yeah, one of the better CAT III films I’ve seen and a rare HK comedy I didn’t find intolerable. What an unexpected pleasure. Makes me wonder if the other CAT III sex comedies like Erotic Ghost Story and Sex and Zen are worth checking out.

[afilmcionado]

Do you remember where you read that, Michael? It surprises me, just because Lawrence Lau was already a pretty established director when he made Spacked Out. He'd already directed his breakout film, Gangs, the Leslie Cheung classic, Arrest the Restless, all three films in the Lee Rock trilogy, and Queen of Temple Street before being the named director on Spacked Out. That's not to say he was necessarily there for Spacked Out, or that To didn't take over on set (he increasingly sounds like the same kind of meddlesome producer as Tsui Hark to me). In the early aughts I knew a guy on Sammo Hung's stunt crew, who described how director Gordon Chan walked off the set of the Jackie Chan movie The Medallion on the second day of photography, leaving Sammo to basically direct the film––and then Gordon Chan returned on the last day of principal photography, as Sammo was attempting to get director credit, to reclaim his position. I don't know if that describes director Laurence Lau at the time of Spacked Out, but he always seemed to me to be something more of an auteur with a purpose than a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers. So I guess the suggestion To directed the film just surprises me.

Update on this: I interviewed Lawrence Lau recently and he said Johnnie To gave him full free rein on the production of Spacked Out, and did pretty much nothing other than coming up with the genre, the funds, and approving the script.

---

On another note, I’ve been browsing the Edward Yang restoration at American Cinematheque and I saw they credit the notorious Golden Princess as the distributor of That Day, On the Beach, instead of Janus or any overseas company. https://www.americancinematheque.com/no ... h-1-30-24/ Would this give any hope to the rights of many HK classics long held hostage by Golden Princess?

[Michael Kerpan]

Thanks for checking this out.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

On another note, I’ve been browsing the Edward Yang restoration at American Cinematheque and I saw they credit the notorious Golden Princess as the distributor of That Day, On the Beach, instead of Janus or any overseas company. https://www.americancinematheque.com/no ... h-1-30-24/ Would this give any hope to the rights of many HK classics long held hostage by Golden Princess?

Maybe I missed something, but I thought Golden Princess was an overseas (specifically Hong Kong) company? If anything, seeing their name makes me think the rights situation remains unchanged—Golden Princess titles aren't completely unbookable (it isn't rare to see one-off screenings of The Killer or Hard Boiled, for example), but the fact that there's something keeping a bunch of them from getting picked up by U.S. distributors makes it impractical for most venues and also stands in the way of video releases.

The big surprise to me is that The Terrorizers is credited to Fortune Star, a company that (at least according to Google) has never been linked to that film before, despite the supposed 2010 copyright date. Other venues screening it as part of their own Yang retrospectives credit it to the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute, which makes a lot more sense since they've taken over most of the CMPC library. That Day, on the Beach ended up with Golden Princess because the CMPC co-produced it with Cinema City (the Taiwanese branch of which was then headed by Sylvia Chang herself) and the latter took the international rights.

[Mr Sausage]

Jet Li

I was big into Jet Li in highschool and saw the bulk of his films. Most of these are rewatches.


Tai Chi Master (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1993)

I hadn’t seen this since high school, where I watched it probably half a dozen times under the name Twin Warriors. As a Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, and Yuen Woo-Ping fan, how could I not? This is a terrific action wuxia, packed full of some of Yuen Woo-Ping’s most exciting choreography. This, and the movie right after it, Fist of Legend, are probably his high point as an action director. While that latter movie focused mostly on grounded one-on-one fights, including an all timer with Li and Billy Chow, this one is more about delirious wirework and massive multi-person battles that grow exponentially in size until Li and Yeoh (plus Fennie Yuen and a few others) are fighting a whole army. The joyous, bristling fight scenes push themselves into more and more extravagant creativity: a fight across tables turns into a fight on stilts? Why not? A fight around an unlit pyre? Why not have it go up the pyre, too, and involve logs being kicked in and out like violent jenga? A rope mesh suspended above the ground? Of course we’re going to fight on it and bounce each other across it. Magnificent. As to plot, there’s more of it than you’d think, and despite the hurtling pace and short run time, there is a lot of proper development (tho’ not always): Jet Li and Chin Siu-Ho grow up in a shaolin temple. Chin is brash, violent, and worldly, and ends up getting them both kicked out. The pair head on different paths, Chin towards power and ambition in the emperor’s army, Li towards friendship and outsiderdom with Yeoh, Yuen, and a band of drunken rebels. Along the way, Li must learn to wield Tai Chi. Yuen Woo-Ping uses every HK trick to make this dynamic: pelting wind and dust, fluttering banners of primary colours, dutch angles, hurtling pull ins, and wirework everywhere. Iron Monkey got a lot more attention back in the day, including a theatrical re-release in North America a decade after initial release, and it’s certainly a terrific actioner. But I’d say Tai Chi Master bests it. Fei Hong said earlier in this thread that as a director, Yuen Woo-Ping was not interested in his female performers, but between this, Wing Chun, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2, Yuen clearly loves Michelle Yeoh. He gives her more to do here than even Chan gave her in Supercop (to say nothing of making Donnie Yen, his own protege, play damsel in distress to Yeoh’s main character in Wing Chun!) She isn’t the main character here, but she’s treated like a star.


My Father is a Hero (Corey Yuen, 1995)

Another one I watched a bunch in high school. I remembered how insane the action was, but had forgotten how all over the place the story and characters are. There’s like a million different things happening: sick wives, kung fu kids, undercover assignments, bombs, nerve gas, robberies, psycho mob bosses, child torture, will-they-won’t-they love stories, fallen idol father-son relationships--it’s one thing after another. Plus Yu Rong-Guang’s twitchy, shoulder-rolling performance. You can follow the plot just fine, but the details are bizarre. Jet Li’s son collects ants, right? But not because he’s into entomology; he does it so his mom can eat them as part of her treatment program. Then there’s Anita Mui’s cop, who befriends Li’s sick wife to get information on Li’s whereabouts, but the cover story she uses on the wife is to tell her that the two of them are porn distributors together, making a point of explaining that a lot of the money is in bestiality. The wife takes the news with commendable equanimity. These left-wing creative decisions make for an ever entertaining movie, and that’s without even mentioning Jet Li tying his kid to a rope and swinging him around like a mace, which is what everyone remembers.


Dragon Fight (Billy Tang, 1989)

This is a new one for me. Filmed in San Francisco by CAT III schlock master Billy Tang, who I’m guessing is the reason for all the mean spirited brutality and violence. Jet Li and Dick Wei are members of a Chinese wushu team giving a tour of America. Dick Wei runs off, determined to stay in America, and Jet Li's attempt to stop Wei leaves him stranded and on the run for a murder he didn’t commit. Wei becomes a gang banger and Li tries to stop him. Stephen Chow in an early role provides comic relief, mainly in the form of harassing women up and down the Bay Area. Choice scene: Chow follows a woman down the freeway at top speed because he thinks she has nice tits. When his van craps out on him and she gets away, he calls her a lesbian. Tsui Hark’s The Master, also starring Li, was shot in 1989 in LA. Did two film teams travel to California at the same time and Li filmed two movies back-to-back, or did Li make two different trips? Either way, the American setting is not a help. It’s obvious the production was hampered by local laws and practises, because the shooting lacks the characteristic dynamism and risky stunt work of HK action. The choreography is still terrific, and the shots and editing have the basic HK philosophy of showing the performers’ full movements; but the shots themselves are boring and tripod bound. The most you get is the occasional pan. There’s also the problem that the America shown here doesn’t feel particularly authentic. I remember The Master having the same problems, but it’s been a long time since I saw it. I’m glad Li abandoned his attempt to Americanize his career, as his return to traditional Chinese subjects over the next few years produced many of his very best films: the Once Upon a Time in China films, the Fong Sai-Yuk films, Swordsman II, and Tai Chi Master. Frankly, even Li’s second, more successful attempt at the American market in the early 2000s didn’t produce much to rival his Hong Kong work. Romeo Must Die, The One, and Kiss of the Dragon are limp in comparison to Fearless and Hero. Only Unleashed aka Danny the Dog matches his HK work, and remains his best Western movie. He’d go on to be wasted as a side character in the Expendables movies and as cookie cutter villains in the third Brendan Fraser Mummy film and the Jason Statham actioner, War. In the decade between The One and The Expendables, Li and Statham went from star and supporting actor, respectively, to co-headliners in War, to bit player and star (again, respectively) in the Stallone series. You can really chart their fortunes by looking at their careers alongside each other. As for Tang, he’d rebound from the film’s failure three years later with an impressive run of gross movies: Dr. Lamb, Run and Kill, and Red to Kill, all among the most infamous CAT III exploitation films and full of unexpected directorial flair. You can see my enthusiasm for Dragon Fight in my desire to talk about almost anything else.


The New Legend of Shaolin (Wong Jing and Corey Yuen, 1994)

A Lone Wolf and Cub riff, with a former shaolin monk and last of his clan, Jet Li, hiding from the forces of the Qing emperor with his young son in tow (played by the same kid from My Father is a Hero). Meanwhile, the map to a secret treasure is tattooed incompletely across the backs of five children. The authorities are after them, and Li and co. have to protect them. I’d seen this in high school as Legend of the Red Dragon, but remember it less well than the first two above. I assume Wong Jing did all the bad comedy and domestic bullshit, and Corey Yuen handled the action scenes. Guess which parts are the good ones? The action is on the crazier end, what with men wielding two-meter long flaming logs, all sorts of weapons springing out of sleeves and collars, an invincible poison man who looks like a burn victim, a sheet metal tank that zips in and out of battle, fight scenes involving multiple ten-year-olds, a monk that can run across a line of swords flying through the air, gigantic flying metal balls that open to reveal ninjas wielding spiked shields, and Jet Li with a spear that can grow five times in length. There's a lot of wild invention here, and it helped offset the tedium of the many comic scenes of the second act.

[dwk]

Frank Djeng posted a screencap of The Valiant Ones on his instagram account. This may not mean anything, but hopefully it means that the "much better master" that Spectrum is releasing in France gets an English friendly release from one of the labels he works with.

[Mr Sausage]

Supercop 2 (Stanley Tong, 1993)

A sequel to a sequel—so goes Hong Kong. Michelle Yeoh’s character from Police Story 3 is spun off into her own film, unsurprising given how she practically stole that movie out from under Chan. She’s a mainland cop whose partner, Yu Rong-Guang, goes to Hong Kong and becomes a criminal, prompting her to once again be sent abroad to take care of things. Chan shows up briefly as his Police Story character in a scene so amazingly unfunny it nearly comes out the other side. Yukari Oshima is one of the baddies of the first utterly frenetic action scene. I wish she’d had more fight time with Yeoh, but she spends most of her brief appearance fighting Yu Rong-Guang. Still nice to see her pop up in something more high profile. Similarly, as an old fan of Yes, Madame, I was looking forward to seeing Yeoh and Dick Wei square off again, only for Wei to spend all his time fighting Louis Fan. Basically, Yeoh doesn’t fight any of the people I wanted to see her fight! She does have a great scene with a gigantic man in the finale, tho’, that kinda makes up for things. In general Yeoh is terrific during the action, but seems disengaged otherwise. Maybe she wasn’t so interested in a sequel, or maybe it was just the cumulative effect of pumping out six films in 1993 (including the two Heroic Trio films, Butterfly and Sword, and Tai-Chi Master--an incredible run of amazing action work, but exhausting even to think about). Tong of course is a reliable action director, most known for his collaborations with Chan, but also showing his stuff in the second and third Iron Angel movies. His huge jungle set piece in the second is an astonishing piece of work, all the more impressive for coming so early in Tong’s career; and the two major fight scenes he gives Moon Lee are probably the best of her career. His action work in Supercop 2 never quite matches the heights his work on Supercop or the second two Iron Angels, but it comes so frequently and with such intensity and ferocity that it easily carries you through the lame drama and characters, and makes this a top notch HK action thriller.


Bodyguard from Beijing (Corey Yuen, 1994)

Of the countless Jet Li’s I saw in high school, I remember this one the least. I didn’t even recognize anything on screen while watching; this may as well’ve been a brand new movie for me. It’s a riff on the Costner/Houston Bodyguard, with a member of a special mainland squad of bodyguards, Jet Li, sent to Hong Kong to protect a pretty witness. The normally exceptional Corey Yuen films some unexceptional action scenes and some lame romantic comedy, with Christy Chung playing the whiny, selfish woman and Jet Li the uptight, unemotional man whose mutual hate turns into love over the 90 minutes of Jet Li shooting people in front of her. This simple plot is overcomplicated with a revenge subplot where Collin Chou, a former member of the Red Army’s so-called Assassin Squad, is out to avenge his brother whom Li had killed in one of the earlier action scenes. So it’s the Bodyguard Squad vs the Assassin Squad, while Jet Li, a man with no sexual charisma, carries on the world’s most unconvincing romance (far more convincing was his queer romance with Brigitte Lin in Swordsman II). Maybe Li and Yuen saw this as a chance for an image shake up. I’m glad they went back to the usual right after with the bizarre but electric My Father is a Hero, because for all that film’s weirdness and lack of proper structure and characters, at least it was exciting and creative, with some of the most memorable action in HK cinema. Bodyguard from Beijing is more conventionally put together with more attention to proper filmmaking, and yet it’s dead on the screen. The creativity picks up in the finale, with some wonderful problem solving during a gunfight in an unlit room that shows the old Corey Yuen energy. But a couple good action scenes aren’t enough to make a movie. Just ask the The Inspector Wears Skirts.

[Mr Sausage]

Once I'm done with Tsui Hark this month (or so I plan, anyway), I'm hoping to get more into King Hu and Chang Cheh. I know where to go with Hu's small filmography, but Chang's? No idea. Anyone got any recommendations? I've seen five already, some years ago:

One Armed Swordsman
The Five Venoms
Crippled Avengers
Five Element Ninjas
Blood Brothers

[therewillbeblus]

Aside from those, unless one is an alternate title for it, I apparently watched and enjoyed Cheh's House of Traps

[Maltic]

Golden Swallow (compare and contrast w Come Drink with Me)

[Mr Sausage]

King Hu

Despite my love of martial arts films and HK cinema, I'm not all that familiar with the stuff made before the mid-80s. So I'm going focus more on classic kung fu films for the next little while, starting with King Hu. I'd watched A Touch of Zen for the Film Club a few years ago, enjoyed it, but never followed up. I'm glad I finally did as Hu's now become a favourite of mine, with A Touch of Zen now feeling more comprehensible than my original, contextless viewing. I more or less watched these in chronological order (two got mixed up, but oh well).



Come Drink With Me (1966)

What stood out immediately is how violent the movie is. There’s an enormous amount of spurting blood for ‘66. Is there another action movie from the period this bloody? I guess Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch were just around the corner, but still, samurai films wouldn’t embrace arterial spurts until the 70s. The Zatoichi movies were largely bloodless through the 60s for instance, and while Kurosawa had a couple good spurts in his Sanjuro films, it was only once per, and in B&W. Sonny Chiba’s notoriously bloody The Street Fighter was ‘74. Spaghetti westerns could be enormously violent, but even stuff like Django or If You Live, Shoot! are bloodless outside a couple scenes. I guess it was surprising to see so much exploitation-level violence in such a beautifully composed, technically superb piece of filmmaking. The gorgeous scope compositions that outline groups of people against the breathtaking scenery of Taiwan was the standout, especially the dynamic way Hu moves his camera to reveal characters and spatial relationships. The fight choreography has the limitations of the period, often veering so close to pure dance that the impact of deadly combat can be lost in the too-perfect placement of weapons and the smooth, posed movements of the fighters. The excellence is all in how Hu films and edits it. The action shoots by in long, gliding shots, and he crafts these explosive moments where a quick shot of a character doing some small movement suddenly bursts to a long shot of a group flying or tumbling all over, the editing itself suggesting the power and dynamism rather than the choreography. The plot is simple, letting the characters engage us with their personalities and drive the action forward with a minimum of exposition or backstory. Hu’s decision to place crucial information in song-and-dance routines is novel and interesting. This is an impossibly fun martial arts movie.


Dragon Inn (1967)

I’ve seen the two remakes, New Dragon Inn and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, but not this one. I liked the 90s version: it has some of Ching Siu-Tung’s most outrageous and electric choreography with multiple combatants spinning and whirling down sand dunes at a hundred miles an hour in great bursts of sand while backlit by the sun; and I’ll watch anything with both Brigitte Lin and Maggie Cheung. It’s a fun, wild, energetic piece of 90s wuxia. Tsui’s sequel/remake from the 2010s was an attempt exhaust the concept, but mostly exhausted me. It’s a tribute to the strength of the original that at no point was I put in mind of its fellows. I was caught immediately by the tense, claustrophobic, paranoid atmosphere of the Inn, with everyone plotting, scheming, and sizing up. It also made me realize The Hateful 8 isn’t Tarantino’s version of The Thing, it’s his version of this movie! Again, the fight scenes lack the bravura creativity of later HK, but Hu makes the most of them with his long takes and compositional sense. And the climatic fight with the asthmatic eunuch just goes on and on and on until you can barely stand it, only to finish with a perfect release. After all that, Hu knows there’s nothing left but to end as quickly and wordlessly as possible. What more is there? I like Come Drink With Me a bit more, but only a bit. This is right on its heels.


The Valiant Ones (1975)

Finally, the choreography has caught up to Hu, courtesy of a young Sammo Hung and seemingly the rest of the seven little fortunes (I saw Yuen Biao and Yuen Wah, the credits list Corey Yuen, and Jackie Chan is reputed to be amongst the pirates in the big battle). The fights have lost the earlier jank: they’re fleet, exciting, and shot with Hu’s eye for dance rhythms. On a pure action level, this is the most exciting Hu film I’ve seen, a breathless series of action set pieces. The plot is simple, but made up of endless complications where tricks, traps, deceits, and reveals happen over and over. There is considerably less philosophical content than even Come Drink With Me, let alone A Touch of Zen, and character is totally absent. So while this is a far more exciting action film, it’s also emptier. It makes up for that, tho’, with an astonishing level of action. I don’t think the film goes five minutes without a fight. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Tsui Hark took inspiration from the finale for the downer endings of his early career, Butterfly Murders especially. If this movie doesn’t get you pumped up, you’re dead inside.


The Fate of Lee Khan (1973)

An action movie mixed with a political thriller. The first and third acts are bursting with action, but the middle stretch is focused more on conspiracies and stratagems. It’s no less exciting, but the excitement is less physical. I wasn’t expecting the setting to be more static than even Dragon Inn, taking place almost exclusively inside the inn, with only one establishing shot early on, and violent events sometimes occurring unseen just outside the door. Indeed, when the story moves suddenly into the hills at the end of the second act, it’s almost shocking to be in such an open environment. I noticed a similarity in the climaxes of this movie and The Valiant Ones, something you can see in embryo in Dragon Inn: the world of violent action is not triumphalist, but desperate, with any victory hard won at a grave cost of human life. Maybe this is a product of Hu’s zen outlook, with worldly commitments like social and political struggles being a place of hardship and death and endless strife rather than an occasion for transcendence, whether it’s heroic or otherwise. So the endings of these movies are a kinetic rush, but they’re not triumphalist. I’m looking forward to getting into Chang Cheh just to compare, as I remember him finding something transcendent and affirming in the spectacle of violence and sacrifice, where Hu seems to place it in the cycle of worldly suffering against a spiritual world of balance and peace (largely absent from the movies mentioned in this capsule, but present in A Touch of Zen). Someone with more knowledge of Hu and these concepts can let me know if I’m off base, but that’s my tentative feelings anyway.


Raining in the Mountain (1979)

For the first time Hu is not making an action movie. Tho’ there are brief moments of it, this is a philosophical and spiritual drama—a deeply exciting one, actually, with its emphasis on plots, counter-plots, conspiracies, and all the drama of human strife. This is also Hu’s most beautiful movie yet. For all it’s zen content, the movie glories in the beauty of the material world. It’s interesting to see Hu’s filmmaking develop away from genre altogether. In a lot of ways, this movie clarifies for me what Hu was up to in A Touch of Zen. Half of this movie is The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly, with a series of interrelated groups all vying for a material object despite more important things happening all around them. That the object isn’t money but something literally valueless, a purely symbolic bit of material whose true worth, the wisdom it contains, sparks no interest in those vying for it, makes the endless scheming and violence seem all the more frivolous. I’m no special admirer of zen Buddhism, but the movie does a fair job of making the material world of strife seem pointless indeed and worth abandoning. A movie of great beauty and excitement.


Legend of the Mountain (1979)

Like seeing the same acting troupe do two plays. This and Raining in the Mountain share the same actors, location, and style. But this one is over an hour longer and more of a folk tale to its counterparts’ political/spiritual drama. A wandering scholar, hired to copy sutras in a far away temple in the mountains, encounters a charming female ghost and her family. Hu's typical interest in plots and strategems is transferred from the political to the supernatural, as different ghosts make a play for the scholar's sutras. The movie brings to mind A Chinese Ghost Story, no doubt due to a shared legacy in Chinese folklore, but also I assume because Tsui Hark was a big King Hu fan. This is a languidly paced movie, preferring atmosphere to incident. Hu seems incapable of making a boring movie, but this much time spent on such a minimal plot did sometimes lead to flagging patience. I’m not sure the movie quite makes a case for its excessive length. This is the lesser of the two Mountain films and not a Hu I expect to return to as often as the others.

[therewillbeblus]

Dragon Inn is my favorite Hu for many of the reasons you cite. I've long felt that Tarantino used it as inspiration for Reservoir Dogs as well, though The Hateful Eight is a more fitting example. The first act of this film is the most fun Hu stuff for me, and endlessly rewatchable. I don't like New Dragon Inn at all, since it loses the lucidity of the original's tension and eruptions of fantastically creative wuxia possibilities (even if choreography improves, the way this is shot feels more tactile, grounded, investing), but yeah, it goes off the rails - I do love how insane the plot is here and how Hu knows it and uses it for comic relief or to demonstrate the superfluousness of some material (i.e. the abrupt ending)

[Mr Sausage]

Reservoir Dogs basically lifts the entire last act of Lam's City on Fire, so I'm not sure Dragon Inn is the inspiration.

New Dragon Inn is very 90s Tsui, so lucidity and groundedness will be in short supply. It's more about headlong rush, nutty or extreme shifts in plot and tone, and charisma over character. It's not Hu-like at all. It's the same plot done in a completely different style, the style of bonkers 90s wuxia. I like it, but not as much as either the original or other Tsui/Ching Siu-Tung collaborations like Swordsman II and III or A Chinese Ghost Story. I think its biggest problem is one that a number of Tsui productions had: too much meddling and too many directors; but it manages to overcome that unlike so many others (A Better Tomorrow II, Swordsman, The Big Heat, King of Chess). Funnily, poor King Hu fell victim himself to Tsui's meddling, controlling producing style on Swordsman and ended up quitting sometime into production (how much he actually filmed is up for debate).

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, I definitely get that - it's just not generally the style I'm into - but I appreciated it more for what it is once I saw more of your and feihong's other 90s HK recs. And agreed that something like Swordsman II is among best examples of this done well

[pistolwink]

I seem to recall (probably from something Tony Rayns wrote and/or said) that King Hu didn't have a "Zen outlook" personally, that he was just interested in Zen as he thought it could lend something special to his wuxia and make them more than just "action movies." Similarly, he wasn't especially interested in martial arts and claimed that he relied on his stuntmen and choreographers to work out the particulars of physical combat. But on the evidence he certainly was interested in how to film combat, especially to create the impression that the fighters transcend the laws of physics.

I love the abrupt conclusion of Dragon Inn so much—and the way he cuts to an extreme long shot to show the

SpoilerShow

eunuch's decapitation.

(Among other things it illustrates how Hu and Chang Cheh were the yin and yang of golden-age wuxia. There's no way Chang would have cut the climax that way.) Perfect ending.

[Mr Sausage]

Here's two I originally saw for the first Horror List Project, over a decade ago. Good to give them a revisit.

Mr. Vampire (Ricky Lau, 1985)

I had a mixed reaction the first time, finding the action creative but the humour annoying. I don't know what changed, but this has rocketed way up in my estimation. I found it a blast all through. The humour, while broad and mugging, just lands somehow, hitting the perfect note of goofiness and charm. And the action is astonishing, approaching each set piece not as a single thrilling incident, but an opportunity to experiment with all possible variations within a single setting, revolving through an endless series of problems and solutions, with each problem becoming crazier and more insurmountable. Films like these are the authentic inheritors of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. It's impossibly entertaining; so much energy and creativity in cheap popular entertainment. It really makes you feel how comparatively little imagination and creativity went into something like Ghostbusters. Mr. Vampire has become a new favourite.


Encounters of the Spooky Kind (Sammo Hung, 1980)

I've kept my original mixed reaction. This is a haphazard film, mostly being a set of various, dimly linked episodes involving Sammo Hung encountering the world of spirits and magic. The humour is pure Sammo, full of endless mugging and forced goofiness. What was so charming in Mr. Vampire often becomes tedious here. But the movie is so restless in coming up with new scenarios and conceits that it's never long before something wild, new, and entertaining comes up, from throwing eggs and animal blood at hopping vampires, to playing Simon Says with corpses, to trying to keep your possessed arm from starting fights while also protecting yourself from the people you anger. The film has all of Hung's usual flaws, being messy, silly, wildly inconsistent tonally, and misogynistic; but it's also shot through with all his strengths--his ambition, his creativity, his sense for timing and rhythm--in concentrated form, while he was at his peak. I don't love the movie, but it's often terrifically entertaining. While not my favourite Hung (that'd be Enter the Fat Dragon), it's among his better efforts.

[therewillbeblus]

We're eye-to-eye here. Encounters is one of my favorite Sammo Hung films, but I don't find many of them very memorable or good, and don't remember much about this one either (despite watching it like a year ago) except that I liked it more than the rest!

I adore Mr. Vampire, so much so that I'm very tempted to pick up the box of sequels. My thoughts from the Eureka thread:

Mr. Vampire is a flat-out blast, reaching levels of wild entertainment I never could have predicted from the relatively soft opening. Its broad comedy (somehow) works almost every time, thanks to comic timing in the performances but also integrally a clear focus within the editing room. The action scenes are shot and play out in a manner that creatively utilizes space and blocking to its advantages, often cutting together bits of simple choreography in response to unexpected stimuli in ways that are thrilling, despite the moves themselves not always being particularly inventive or extravagant martial arts. The filmmakers' aims are not to default onto the predictable fallbacks of skillsets in innovative self-defense exchanges, but rather to implement imaginative regurgitations of eccentric ideas into gonzo setpieces with impulsive methodology, as if every 'What if..' thought from a writer or crew member made it into the final product, haphazardly in the midst of its utterance and without any sharpening or compromise. That this 'throw everything at the wall' approach works as well as it does is a testament to the tight communication between participants: strong directing, acting, and also likely a sensitive and caring approach to tonal tinkering in post. The subplot Finch pointed out didn't bother me at all under this film's ethos of how unashamed it is to throw us into a colorful well of jarring information. The way the "ghost seductress" approaches her target made me do a double take and laugh out loud, and all the ensuing gags- including the master chastising the boy from the windowsill yet not intervening, playing an audience member gawking at the subplot with a reflexive WTF- just elevated the film from would-be-mindless histrionics to the heavenly, concentrated space of intelligent camp grazing high art.

[Mr Sausage]

I always figured I wasn’t the biggest fan of Sammo as director, but looking through his filmography, I actually like a good number of them:

Enter the Fat Dragon (the best thing to come out of the Brucesploitation craze)
Encounters of the Spooky Kind
The Prodigal Son
Wheels on Meals
Millionaire’s Express
Eastern Condors
Dragon’s Forever
Pedicab Driver
Mr. Nice Guy

That’s a decent slab of films, actually. Maybe I’m actually a Sammo fan?