Tag: 1981

Country of Beauties

  By

★★½
“Still a better movie than Wonder Woman 1984.“

This Taiwanese production takes place on an island where women have been separate from men for 23 generations, developing more or less your stereotypical Amazonian society. Men are rejected, male babies tossed out to see to sink or swim (typically the former) and they have build a giant, albeit largely unconvincing, statue of their founding ruler, which fires cannonballs out of its eyes. This is not inappropriate, since the current occupant of the throne, Queen Nadanwa (Yeung). has a harsh line in anti-male rhetoric (“All men are dangerous!”), accompanied by castration. Her subjects dress either in flimsy white robes or shiny battle armour, and engage in gymnastic or circus-related forms of entertainment.

Nadanwa’s antipathy initially seems not wrong, as the island is raided by rapist pirates, who are barely fought off by the women. However, it turns out there is another island nearby, occupied only by men – the survivors of the sea-dispatched male babies mentioned above. They’re more chill, and just want to get back to both sexes living in harmony. The ruler’s sister Chung Ah (Fong) has been having a secret affair with their leader, Lu (Wong). Needless to say, queenie is not going to be happy about this. However, she does eventually realize that some men might just have their uses, such as increasing the power of her eyeball cannons, in order to defend her realm from the pirates.

You may be thinking this could perhaps go through male rape for comedic purposes, a hunt for treasure, light lesbian canoodling and end in a mass battle between the Amazons and the buccaneers, with the island of men coming in to save the day. This will, in all likelihood, be accompanied by an upbeat and poppy soundtrack, which could not possibly be more eighties if it was sporting AquaNet and leg-warmers. Well, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Nadanwa also keeps a tiger as a pet, which fits with her general philosophy, I guess. Though it must be said, these Amazons do seem weirdly incompetent, needing male help not just in the armaments category, but when giving birth. You’d think they might have figured out the basics after 23 generations. 

There are some reasonable moments of scale here, though things like the battles against the pirates are more notable for the number of participants than their combat ability. The problem is mostly one of tone, and it’s hardly alone there, in Taiwanese productions from this decade. A lot of the attempts at comedy have not aged well, if they were ever funny to begin with. In a movie which also includes wholesale child genocide, sexual assault of both genders, and genital mutilation, you’re not exactly looking for light relief. Although Yeung is her usual reliable self as a leader, this falls short of the likes of Golden Queens Commando., and only just scrapes over the bar set at a height of “acceptable entertainment.”

Dir: Yang-Ming Tsai
Star: Fong-fong Fong, Don Wong, Elsa Yeung
a.k.a. Island Warriors

Firecracker

  By

★★★
“Less a damp squib than expected.”

Admittedly, I did have to pause this five minutes in, because I had a strong sense that I’d seen it before. Turns out that wasn’t the case, I was just confusing it with another Cirio Santiago movie. There are quite a few candidates, but I think it was most likely Angel Fist. For both films feature blonde Americans, going to the Philippines in search of an errant sister, and have a kung-fu scene in which the heroine’s clothing proves optional, if you know what I mean and I think you do. So confusion is understandable.

The heroine here is Susanne Carter (Kesner, who ended up becoming well-known as an Orson Welles historian!), whose sister has vanished after getting too close to a criminal gang run by Erik (Metcalfe). They are nothing if not broad in their empire, which as well as the usual drugs, prostitution and gambling, also include martial arts death matches, put on in what appears to be a supper club. Dinner and a show, as they say. This is convenient, since whaddya know, Susanne has a sixth dan black belt in such things. She uses her skills to impress Erik’s similarly kung-fu able henchman, Chuck Donner (Hinton) and get close to the operation, seeking the truth about her sibling’s fate. However, turns out there is already a police operation investigating the gang, and Susanne’s presence puts that undercover case at risk.

The martial arts here are… not great. Kesner just about reaches decent on occasion, although there seems to be clear doubling going on for the more athletic moments. However, the film certainly has no shortage of action, and some of the supporting cast are good enough that the film passes muster as overall entertainment. Easily the greatest sequence is the one where Susanne is pursued on her way home by two street thugs, and through a series of misadventures, her costume is steadily reduced, going from an evening dress and high heels to, by the end of the fight, just a pair of panties. I can honestly say I have never previously seen anyone’s bra be cut open with a scythe in the middle of a fight.

That sequence, along with the villain’s demise – bamboo stakes get shoved into both his eyes simultaneously! – and the quite glorious poster (click on the image to see it full size), are sufficient to make me willing to overlook most of the film’s obvious flaws. This is very much the kind of thing  meant, when people talk about the eighties being a golden age of action movies on VHS. This is certainly not a good movie, fun though it is to see the likes of Diaz – an almost ever-present sidekick, who was to the Philippino film industry, what Michael Ripper was to Hammer Films. Yet if I’d stumbled across this for one of my all-night video sessions during the decade, it would have left me thoroughly satisfied, having given me everything I was looking for.

Dir: Cirio H. Santiago
Star: Jillian Kesner, Darby Hinton, Ken Metcalfe, Vic Diaz

Night Witches in the Sky

  By

★★★
“Spirits in the sky.”

kinopoisk.ru

This was made in the early eighties, when the Soviet Union and United States were making loud, growling sounds at each other. Being a product of that era perhaps explains the way this feels almost like a propaganda film, made to inspire the population to be prepared to fight in defense of the motherland. Its closest cousin on this site is therefore the similar Chinese film, The Red Detachment of Women. The topic here is one we’ve covered before: the renowned “Night Witches”, the all-female air force squadron, who carried out reconnaissance and bombing missions against the Germans on the Eastern front, during the second half of World War II.

The two central characters are Galya Polikarpova (Druz) and Oksana Zakharchenko (Grushina). The former is recuperating from injury in hospital, but sneaks out against doctor’s orders in order to rejoin her colleagues on the front lines. The pair are hauled over the coals for this by their long-suffering commanding officer (Menshikova), but are able to escape punishment due to the shortage of fliers making operational needs more important. Thereafter… Well, to be perfectly honest, not a great deal happens, and the film comes in at less than 80 minutes.  At points, it almost feels like an edited-down version of a longer feature.

For instance, there’s one point where they are being harried by a Messerschmitt – then, suddenly, they’re landing in a field to sweep up an orphaned boy, Fyodor (Zamulin), who becomes an unofficial mascot of the squadron, despite efforts by the higher-ups to send him away. There’s also a long-distance romance between Galya and another soldier that didn’t do much for me.

However, one point about this production is particularly worth noting. Director Yevgeniya Zhigulenko was actually a “night witch” herself, having been a member of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Initially a navigator in May 1942, she became a pilot and eventually a flight commander. By the end of the war, she had flown close to a thousand sorties, and been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. There can’t be many films from any country set in World War II, which were directed by someone who took part in the events depicted.

This was one of two features she made, and seems more functional than particularly artistic, though may have been constrained by its budget. Some of the flying sequences are… let’s say, not particularly convincing. But perhaps due to the director’s background, it does have a down-to-earth (pun not intended) approach which does occasionally work in the film’s favour. One example would be when the women are struggling to get their planes launched out of the mud, after heavy rain. But generally, the tempo is kept upbeat and patriotically optimistic, with only occasional nods to the heavy toll of life taken by the conflict. All told, a decent effort; I’d just give the edge to the TV series Night Swallows, whose greater length allows for more depth in its characterizations.

Dir: Yevgeniya Zhigulenko
Star: Yana Druz, Valentina Grushina, Dima Zamulin, Nina Menshikova
a.k.a. V nebe ‘Nochnye vedmy’

Lovely But Deadly

  By

★★★
“No, no! Not the chopped liver!”

After her brother drowns while high on drugs, Mary Ann “Lovely” Lovitt (Dooling) goes undercover at his school, Pacific Coast High, in order to root out the dealers responsible for his death. She discovers that the problem is far larger than is admitted, with those involved, and includes not just some of the most revered pupils e.g. star players on the football team (and, on more than one occasion, their jealous girlfriends!). A number of adults are also culpable, including leading school boosters, all the way up to leading local businessman ‘Honest Charley’ Gilmarten (Herd). Fortunately, Mary Ann is an expert in martial-arts, so proves more than capable of defending herself when attempts are made to dissuade her from investigating further.

The first thirty minutes of this are startlingly entertaining, which was a real shock. Sure, Dooling’s fighting skills leave a little to be desired… okay, a lot to be desired, yet her opponents sell the moves with surprising effectiveness. It feels almost like a parody of high-school films, made in the Philippines as a sly comment on President Duterte’s war on drugs, though the soundtrack appears to have strayed in from a Bond film. That applies especially to the title song, I believe sung by Marcia Woods, with its classic lyrics, such as “So low, so low, so low/How low, how low can they go?” And how could you go wrong with a film where, ten minutes in, the heroine force-feeds a dealer his own supply, while telling him a story about an old possum? Or where Mary Ann and her friend (O’Leary) are chased through the school by a pack of people in fencing uniforms?

Unfortunately, it can’t sustain this loopy energy, and loses its way badly in the middle. At least the scene where Honest Charley hits on our heroine is less creepy than you might imagine: Dooling was 27 at the time this came out, so was not exactly a convincing high-school student. She’s not the only one: school football star ‘Mantis’ Manigian is played by Rick Moser who, far from school, was actually a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers at the time. There are still sporadic moments of interest in the rest of the film. The costume party that turns into a cat-fight, leading to the immortal line at the top of this review. Or the extended climax at the docks, where Lovely is helped out by the rest of her kung-fu class, all fetching clad in their matching, zebra-striped karategi.

However, for every one of these, there are two or more scenes of tedium, such as the subplot involving Mary Ann’s boyfriend and his ambitions to be a singer (the actor involved ended up producing David Hasselhoff albums, which should be penance enough for anyone). In the end, while likely remaining more entertaining than most of its ilk, this (probably inevitably) falls short of its alternative tag-line, “James Bond couldn’t… Bruce Lee wouldn’t… They can’t do what Lovely can!!”

Dir: David Sheldon
Star: Lucinda Dooling, Michael O’Leary, John Randolph, Richard Herd

Miraculous Flower

  By

★★★
“Flower power”

Another solid Pearl Chang movie – despite being mis-labelled as Wolf Devil Woman 3, it is in now way related to that super weird entry. This is closer to The Invincible Swordswoman, though is not without its strange aspects. Pearl plays May, who gets an annoyingly cryptic mission from her dying mother – I mean, if I was about to shuffle off, my last words would be considerably less vague than, and I quote, “I’ve put a very important thing in a box… You will find out about a great, great secret. From that, you will see the task that you have to perform.” She then drags said sick parent round the countryside for a bit, not even noticing for a while that she’s now pulling a corpse [like I said: not without its strange aspects].

She befriends a roaming scholar (Tsung), who has a secret identity as a vigilante, and after helping fend off a home invasion, is adopted by his family. The whole “mission given by her dying mother” thing appears largely forgotten by May at this point. Eventually – and it could be weeks, months or years, since time-frames are not this movie’s strong suit – she remembers about it, and heads out on the road again. Suddenly stricken with guilt, she’s about to fling herself into a gorge when she’s stopped by the Happy Fairy (Gua), so named because her grin achieves Joker-like levels of permanence.

She increases May’s stock of skills, adding to those picked up from the vigilante scholar, though her training methods involve literally spit-roasting May, as well as turning her into a living snow-woman [again: strange aspects]. It all makes sense after the Fairy tells her a story about a bloody massacre from which there was only one survivor. May inexplicably fails to grasp the deeply-personal connection this anecdote has, well after the audience has figured it out. But this sets in motion the final act, where she turns into the Miraculous Flower – yeah, I was wondering when that was going to become relevant, too. She sets about obtaining her revenge, leaving a white blossom on the scene as her calling-card. Though it’s not as straightforward as that (let’s face facts: it never is), with the secateurs of May’s justice ending up cutting perilously close to her life before becoming the vengeful flora.

Not much is known about the director of this, but he seems to have had a serious thing for heights. The movie certainly makes the most out of Taiwan’s mountainous scenery: as well as the gorge mentioned above, we get battles on the sides of mountains and a particularly memorable one on a waterfall. The story isn’t more than a series of cliches, and definitely tries to stuff too much into its 86 minutes, while the lifting of the theme from The Twilight Zone is particularly blatant. Yet, I’d rather have a movie with too much imagination, rather than not enough: and you’d certainly be hard pushed to claim this fell into the latter category. I was more than adequately entertained.

Dir: Fong Ho
Star: Pearl Ling Chang, Tsung Hua, Gua Ah Leh, Wang Hsieh
a.k.a. Phoenix the Ninja

Deadly Silver Angels

  By

★★
“Hong Kong. A paradise of adventures. And a centre of scum…”

That’s the voice-over with which this starts, segueing into a bit of nude interpretive dance – well, semi-nude, the guy keeps his Y-fronts on, for which I am grateful – that has absolutely no relation to the rest of the film. At its core, this is a battle of triad versus triad: one overseen by Lau, the other by Fung. The former is assassinated, and his daughter, Angel (Yeung) takes over – she’s also keen to track down the perpetrators, with the most obvious beneficiary being Fung. But not so sure is Fung’s right-hand man, Jimmy Lee (Lee), who was there for the killing, and helps Angel’s investigation.

She also has her own team of henchwomen. Their numbers are doubled after a training session on the beach – complete with swimming caps, which makes the whole thing impossible to take seriously – intercut with random dirt-bike footage. Their practice (though quite what this is practice for, remains unclear) is interrupted by the five lady venoms, a girl gang who all have tattoos of birds on their backs. This has a bit of a mixed impact: an eagle is one thing, but an owl suggests more you’re a hardcore Harry Potter fan than a lethal lady. Anyway, after Angel takes on their leader in a beach brawl, the gang agree to join forces – though I would presume, the lady venoms draw the line at having to wear those swimming caps.

It’s all extremely fragmented, makes little sense and generates little interest. There are some cheap laughs to be had, such as the trip by Angel and her team to rescue a couple of women from a brothel. I mean, it’s called the Virgins’ Hell whorehouse, what exactly did you think was going on there? Or there’s the (entirely unauthorized, I strongly suspect) cover of Earth, Wind and Fire’s Boogie Wonderland which shows up for no apparent reason, with other music also stolen from better movies. But generally, this is the kind of film where most of the amusement value to be found has to be provided by the viewer, and it’s quite a lot of work.

There’s some slight interest in Angel being a gangster of honour e.g. a main bone of contention with the Fungs is their willingness to go into the burgeoning drug trade. But nicking plot elements from The Godfather does not make you a good film. Indeed, in this case, it’s likely more of an unwanted diversion from what you want to see, which is Angel and her crew kicking ass. The same goes for the “long-lost siblings” subplot, which comes out of nowhere near the end. Yeung carved herself a niche in the fairly esoteric “female group kung-fu” sub-genre of production during the first half of the eighties (this one dates from 1984), most notably Golden Queen’s Commando and Pink Force Commando. Those were, at least, mad enough to be entertaining. This? Not so much.

Dir: Cheung Chi Chiu
Star: Elsa Yeung, Eagle Lee, Ma Sha, Kong Do
a.k.a. 5 Lady Venoms a.k.a. Virago

Cattle Annie and Little Britches

  By

★★★
“All legends end in bullshit.”

One of the subjects here almost lived long enough to see her story on the big screen: the woman who was Cattle Annie passed away only three years before the movie version was released in April 1981. Playing her was the daughter of Christopher Plummer, Amanda, in her screen debut (she already had stage experience off-Broadway), while the role of Little Britches went to another near-newcomer who would also go on to fame in her own right, Diane Lane. It was based on Robert Ward’s book – he co-wrote the screen-play – and seems to take a fairly fast and loose approach to the facts of the pair’s lives. Though given the huge uncertainty involved in those, it’s hard to complain too much.

For example, rather than being born and brought up in Oklahoma, the duo are portrayed as making their way out to California to seek their fortune, when they’re forcibly detoured to Guthrie, OK, There, they encounter Bill Doolin (Lancaster) when he and his gang visit the town. Annie falls for gang member Bittercreek Newcomb (John Savage) and they end up being taken by him to the gang’s hideout. Their knowledge of the Doolin Gang is entirely based on the embellished stories they’ve heard about them, and they’re disappointing to find reality comes up short.

The man they encounter, and whose gang they join, is considerably older than the real person. Lancaster was 67 at the time, while Doolin was in his late thirties. The girls are also played significantly older: 23 during filming, Plummer was a full decade older than the real Cattle Annie. The cinematic Doolin seems increasingly weary of the whole outlaw thing, of being pursued by the relentless Bill Tilghman (Steiger), and has little or no interest in living up to his own mythology when he meets the pair. But Cattle Annie’s belief in the legend, at least somewhat reignites the fire. Though after his capture, Doolin returns to fatalism, and it’s up to the girls to stage a rescue mission, when the rest of the gang would just let their leader hang.

You get something of the hardscrabble life about the pair, and how the outlaw life is one of the few routes by which they could escape their grinding poverty. As Annie says after their failed initial attempt to follow Doolin, “I’ll not be a white nigger slave woman! I’d rather burn like a fire!” But there isn’t an enormous amount going on, and the film seems to contain a fair bit of filler, such as an impromptu game of baseball, using equipment looted during a train robbery [As a baseball fan, seems doubtful the entire group of adult men would be so oblivious of the sport as they appear. This was the mid 1890’s: the National League had been running for close to 20 years, with a team in St. Louis, one state over] Though as a meditation on the dying embers of the “Wild West,” and the gap between heroic fiction and slogging through endless rain and mud, it’s effective enough, and you can see why both young leads would go on to greater fame.

Dir: Lamont Johnson
Star: Amanda Plummer, Diane Lane, Burt Lancaster, Rod Steiger

Angels With Golden Guns

  By

★½
“Virgin on the ridiculous.”

The beautifully lurid sleeves above and below probably give you some idea of why this one fell across my TV. They probably also explain the sarcasm dripping from Chris’s lips, during the three minutes she remained in the room. I can’t really argue with her on this one: it’s an entirely incoherent mess, though I have to say, I was entertained somewhat more than the one and a half star rating above would imply. The latter is a reflection of quality, and that I could only recommend this, even in the loosest of terms, to fans of bad movies who are feeling significantly masochistic.

The plot, and I used the term loosely, focuses on a white slavery ring, that seems to specialize in the bulk abduction of models who, in between being rented out to sleazy individuals. are then held in a remote jungle compound, from which there is no escape. We know there is no escape, because they try – quite why the captives don’t wait until the rather more escape-friendly location of their renting-out, is never clear. But, hey, this gives the warden who oversees them the chance to yell a lot, and there is also the opportunity for what may well be the biggest cat-fight in cinema history, so that’s nice. Meanwhile, a detective is also investigating the gang from the other direction – when not pretending to be gay, in a disco sequence which is either extremely tolerant or very homophobic, I’m not sure which.

According to what I’ve read, producer Joseph Lai inherited a film studio which had a lot of abandoned movies in various states of completion, and made his career out of finishing them – usually with little regard for continuity or logic – and marketing the results by focusing heavily on the sizzle. I can’t vouch for the veracity of this, yet it certainly goes a long way towards explaining the results here, which includes a strip version of Play Your Cards Right (Wikipedia advises me that US visitors should read that as Card Sharks). Matters are not helped by English dubbing that seems to have assigned accents at random, and music stolen from other, much better movies – I’m fairly certain Goblin didn’t give Lai permission to use chunks of their score from Suspiria, anyway.

Not that it’s an inappropriate choice, for this does capture a similarly incoherent, dreamlike quality – I suspect less through artistic vision, more a result of scenes that appear completely out of nowhere, bear exactly no relation to anything that has happened, then vanish without any further reference to them or their participants. If Andy Sidaris was Chinese, and entirely out of his gourd on magic mushrooms, this might be the sort of thing which would result. Just do not take that as any kind of recommendation.

Dir: “Pasha” (Shan Pa)
Star: Eva Bisset, Gigi Bovee, Emma Yeung, Hok Nin Lau
a.k.a. Virgin Apocalypse
or Terror in a Woman’s Prison
or, entirely inexplicably, Anger

My Young Auntie

  By

★★★½
“Serious kung fu, light gags.”

youngauntieHui won the Best Actress award at the first ever Hong Kong Film Awards for her role in this 1981 film, in which she plays Cheng Tai-nun, a young martial-arts expert who marries an elderly landowner so that his unscrupulous brother won’t be able to take the landowner’s assets upon his death. Instead, title passes to Tai-nun, who heads off to Canton to stay with her (much older) nephew, Yu Cheng-chuan (Lau), and his son Yu Tao (Ho), whose hip, young ways clash badly with Tai-nun much more traditionalist views. But the brother plans to steal the dead to what he considers “his” estate, and it’s up to Tao and Tai-nun to prevent that – with the help of a roster of elder relatives and Cheng-chuan, who must also be coached in the ways of kung-fu.

There’s three-quarters of a very good film here, and Hui is amazing; not someone to whom I’d paid any attention before, she was both lithe and graceful. This isn’t limited to her fighting skills. Perhaps the peak of the film is a masked ball which Tai-nun is tricked into attending by Tao, and her lack of dance skills are embarrassingly exposed, in a range of genres from tango to swing. It’s brilliant, because you get a real appreciation for the coordination required in making yourself look incredibly uncoordinated. That this turns into a massive and well choreographed sword-fight, with Tai-nun dressed as Marie Antoinette [at a guess] is merely a very pleasant bonus. Director Lau went on to helm Drunken Master II and this has much the same approach, combining comedy and action to good effect; the laughter flows naturally from the characters, rather than (as so often) appearing forced; the caption from the trailer, quoted at the top, gets it about right.

The main problem is a final third which unceremoniously shunts Tai-nun off to one side, with the climax pitting Tao and his older uncles against their thieving relative, as they try to get the property deed back to its rightful owner. If decent enough, there’s nothing at all to separate it from a plethora of other films of its kind and type from the era, and you just wish they had given Hui – perhaps with Ho – a final chance to shine, instead of all but eliminating her from the movie that bears her character’s name. Still, if you can keep your brain around the blizzard of generational family loyalties (or, alternatively, ignore them completely), you’re in for a fun time. If it could fairly be accused of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the wall, more than enough sticks to justify it, and Hui makes for a striking heroine, whose other films I am clearly going to have to chase down.

Dir: Lau Kar Leung
Star: Kara Hui, Hsiao Ho, Lau Kar Leung, Wang Lung Wei, Gordon Liu