Tag: kung-fu

Wing Chun

  By

★★★½
“Half kick-ass fights, half zany bedroom farce”

wingchunWing Chun is the name both of the school of martial arts, and the woman whom legend has it was responsible for its creation – which, in itself, is pretty cool. Tradition says Yim Wing Chun was an 18th-century figure, to whom a warlord proposed (rather forcefully, one imagines) marriage: she developed the style and used it to beat him, thereby escaping wedlock. This movie is a very loose depiction of her life: Yim and her wily but unloved sister, Abacus Fong (Yuen) run a tofu shop in a town plagued by raids from local bandits. Yim rescues a beautiful woman, Charmy (Catherine Hung) from them, and Charmy’s allure brings crowds of customers – well, at least male ones – to the store. Yim’s former sweetheart, Leung Pok To (Yen) shows up, determined to woo her again, but mistakes Charmy for Yim. Meanwhile, bandit leader Flying Chimpanzee (Chu) has had enough of Yim humiliating his men, and kidnaps Charmy to lure the martial arts mistress into their fortress.

You’ve got Yeoh, the greatest kung-fu actress of all time, in my opinion. You’ve got Yen, who’s the greatest kung-fu actor of the modern era, in my opinion (Bruce Lee, and Jackie Chan in his prime, might be slightly better). You’ve got veteran Cheng Pei Pei, who’d find fame five years later in Crouching Tiger, as Yim’s teacher. And you’ve got Yuen, the greatest kung-fu director – I’m not even going with “in my opinion” on that one. So, why isn’t this a solid gold, five-star classic? Simply because, while the fights are awesome, the stuff between the fights is nearer to awful, focusing far too heavily on slapstick of the British, “Whoops! Where are my trousers?” comedy school. Not, I should stress that I’m averse to that per se: it just isn’t what I want in my action movies. Here, people leap in and out of bedroom windows, fall over themselves at Fong’s “stinky tofu” breath, and repeatedly, somehow manage to mistake Yeoh for a man. None of this is the slightest bit interesting, and it’s even less amusing.

Indeed, it’s a tribute to how good the battles are, that I was prepared to endure comedic stylings apparently crafted by an unsophisticated eight-year-old, to get to the next confrontation. Take your pick of which is best. The one on the docks? The battle over a tray of tofu? The encounter in an inferno? We haven’t even mentioned Yim vs. Flying Chimpanzee, which is the duel so good, they had to do it twice [and I was impressed Yeoh retained her position at the heart of the movie, not stepping aside to make way for Yen]. Without exception, these are all imaginative, inventive, varied, fluidly shot and edited: practically a master-class on how fight sequences should be filmed. The trailer below – which wisely removes just about everything else apart from the martial arts – will give you some idea. It’s just a shame their grace and beauty isn’t in the service of anything more memorable than dumb humour.

Dir: Yuen Wo Ping
Star: Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Kingdom Yuen, Norman Chu

Emergency Police Lady

  By

★★½
There appear to be no words in Taiwanese for “short, controlled bursts.”

EmergencyPoliceLadyThis 1989 film from Taiwan, swings unevenly between some rather good action, wild stabs at comedy that isn’t as funny as it thinks, and one of the screechiest and least appealing single-note performances, this side of an Adam Sandler movie. Now, I’m not going to able to attribute specific blame for the latter, because it was tough enough finding names for the cast here, let alone associate them with particular characters. The only one I think I recognized was Hu, playing the officer in charge of a new “women’s department,” which is given all the female cops with whom none of their chauvinist colleagues want to work, and who is tasked with trying to forge them into a coherent force. You have the usual mix of “wacky” characters: the taciturn hard-case, the foreign girl (Singapore in this case), and worst of all, the whiny, bespectacled bitch who think she’s the bee’s knees, but is, in fact, completely useless.

I defy anyone to get through five minutes of her scenes, without wanting to reach through the TV and warmly greet her by the throat, to stop her high-pitched shrieking and manic over-acting. Actually, scratch that, since any use of the word “acting” in connection with this performance is entirely inappropriate: she just flails her arms around and pulls faces, in lieu of attempting to convey even the shallowest of emotions. That’s a shame, as there are some elements of this which are perfectly competent, though the script has no surprises, and indeed, doesn’t bother much with a genuine storyline. One second, the girls are going undercover at a nightclub to break up an arms deal (where we learn the ‘fact’ at the top of the review). The next, they’re investigating a gang of robbers who specialize in leaving no witnesses alive, but a torn-off button leaves one woman believing she knows the identity of a gang member.

Still, I’m prepared to forgive the narrative disconnects, because the action isn’t bad. Nothing amazing, mind, but it helps that the director films it well – in particular, finding a good middle-ground of distance, so you aren’t overwhelmed, yet can still tell it’s mostly the actual actresses who are being flung around. Some of the early judo stuff is good, and the final battle against the robbers is also memorable, ending in a giant fireball which seems to come perilously close to toasting the leads, in the same way Devil Hunters would actually do the following year. Admittedly, if the shrieking harridan had turned into a human marshmallow, I’m not sure I’d have shed a tear, and there’s just too much sub-Police Academy slack in the middle, with poor comedy and worse romance occupying far too high a percentage of the running time.

Dir: Lee Tso-Nam
Star: Sibelle Hu, Yip Chuen-Chan, Kau Hoi-Ching, Alexander Lo

T.N.T. Jackson

  By

★★½
“More of a damp squib than dynamite.”

tntjacksonDescribed in 1975 by no less than Roger Ebert as, “easily the worst movie I’ve seen this year,” Jackson concerns the investigation of the titular T.N.T. (Bell) into the disappearance of her brother in Hong Kong. It seems to have something to do with the drug-smuggling ring run by Sid (Metcalf), whose minions include Elaine (Anderson), who might not be quite what she seems, and Charlie (Shaw), the only person in Hong Kong whose Afro can rival TNT’s for size, firmness or general Afro-tastic quality.  Someone keeps hijacking Sid’s shipments, so Charlie puts together a team of the colony’s finest fighters to protect it: seeing her chance to get into the organization, T.N.T. auditions and gets a job. However, no everyone is as convinced of her innocence as Sid.

I wouldn’t go quite as far as the late Mr. Ebert (though the cover on the right likely ranks up there with the very worst visualizations of all time!), but this comes over as a lame imitation of Pam Grier’s genre entries, with a greater emphasis on martial-arts, rather than gunplay or other forms of violence. Which is kinda weird, considering that Bell was previously most famous for being the first African-American woman to be seen on the cover of Playboy. The other oddness here is that it was co-written by cult actor Dick Miller, who had a long career working for Roger Corman, in the likes of Bucket of Blood, and The Little Shop of Horrors. This was the last of his three writing credits; I guess, he figured that after this, things could only go downhill.

There are a couple of scenes of striking brutality – an early arm-breaking and the finale, where she punches her opponent’s heart out – and one, which I’m still trying to figure out if it’s empowering or racist, where T.N.T., keeps turning the lights out because she’s almost invisible in the dark. Well, as long as she doesn’t smile, I guess. The fights are pretty unimpressive, with some painfully obvious stunt doubling for Bell. Truth be told, Anderson probably fares better than the heroine in this category, and the best fight might be between the two of them in a graveyard. However, much of this has not stood the test of time well, and the film desperately needs someone like Grier, to elevate proceedings through sheer force of personality.

Dir: Cirio H. Santiago
Star: Jeannie Bell, Stan Shaw, Pat Anderson, Ken Metcalf
Previously capsule reviewed in the Women Who Kick Butt box-set.

High Kickers

  By

★½
“Desperately in need of more kick.”

highkickersHanging on the wall of the training gym in this film, is a banner on which is written in large letters: “WTF”. I imagine this is probably supposed to stand for “World Taekwondo Federation”, but it’s an unfortunate acronym for any organization. Says quite a bit that this is perhaps the most memorable thing, in what is not far from a Chinese knock-off of one of the more forgettable American martial-arts flicks of the 80’s, Best of the Best. Lingling (Huang) shows up one day at a failing taekwondo school run by Zhao Yumin (Liu), and asks to be trained for the national championships, even though she’s never fought before. Zhao sets her an impossible challenge, but when Lingling succeeds, is forced to take her on. As the rest of the film unfolds, we discover why the gym is failing – a former pupil died in a previous championship bout against the cockily brutal Gao Zhi (Cheng) – and also the reason for LingLing’s sudden interest in martial arts. If you’ve seen Best, you’ll probably be there already.

To give you some idea of how generally lame this is, the “impossible challenge” set for the heroine is… to go to a railway station and buy a ticket. We’re given no idea of why this is supposedly such a feat, because we don’t get to see any of it. Maybe it’s surrounded by a pit of crocodiles or something. Huang is also pretty unconvincing, with arms like twigs: before her climactic battle, we get to see her in one bout, which she wins with a gimmick move, so the viewer is never given any reason to feel that she has a realistic chance against Gao. That’s especially the case, after the only martial arts worthy of note, which is when he comes to the gym and basically demolishes an entire platoon of trainees.

The rest of the time is little more than a parade of martial-arts clichés, with Xie far too over-fond of the training montage as a cinematic device. Admittedly, my school of thought says “once” is about the limit, and you’d better have a good reason for doing it that often. Still, it’s in line with the other aspects: the characters are uninteresting, performances nothing special and, with the sole exception noted above, the fight sequences do little to generate excitement or interest. I note that the film is conveniently missing from Gordon Liu’s filmography on the IMDb: if I were in his shoes, I’d probably hope it stays that way.

Dir: Xie Yi
Star: Eva Huang, Gordon Liu, Mark Cheng, Daniel Chan

Dreaming the Reality

  By

★★★
“Taking the red pill”

Dreaming the RealityThere’s half a good movie here, albeit one which treads some rather familiar territory. It might seem hard to go wrong, with three of the most-renowned Hong Kong action actresses in one place, but as we saw with Avenging Quartet, quantity does not guarantee quality. The main issue is two separate plots, which appear to have strayed in from entirely different movies, and which don’t even cross paths for about an hour.

In one corner, we have Kat (Oshima) and Silver Fox (Lee), who have been raised by their foster father as assassins. But after one hit results in collateral damage to an unfortunately-timed school bus, Fox starts to have doubts about her career path. They’re dispatched to Thailand to recover a floppy disk containing damaging evidence [Older readers: it wasn’t even one of the little ones, but a full-on 5 1/4″ disk! Younger readers: look “floppy disk” up.]. Fox gets their target, but in the ensuing chase suffers a bout of cinematic amnesia. And that’s where the other plot kicks in. Lan (Hu) is an ex-HK cop who has been trying to keep her brother, Rocky (Lam), out of trouble, despite his ambitions to be a champion kick-boxer. This leads to all kinds of goofy and entirely uninteresting shenanigans, with Lan having to sub for Rocky in one fight, fend off an evil manager, etc.

It’s only after Fox stumbles into Lan’s bar, that things gel, and from then on, it’s an almost ceaseless barrage of gunfire and punches, with some surprising deaths, and all three heroines on top form, particularly Lee and Hu. This makes up for the opening hour, which largely alternates between the “tortured killer” cliché and excruciating comic mugging. The former is preferable, not just because the action is better-staged, but also because Lee and Oshima do get to deliver some interesting lines, which succeed in giving their characters a bit more depth than you’d imagine. When Fox asks Kat, “What would you do if I died?”, her answer is a straightforward yet poignant, “I’d die with you.” But this darkness jars badly with the slapstick elements, and Liu has no idea how to combine them into anything like a coherent whole.

Dir: Tony Liu
Star: Moon Lee, Yukari Oshima, Sibelle Hu, Ben Lam

Here’s the end fight, with Lee going up against Eddie Ko, who plays her foster father.

A Girl Fighter

  By

★★★
“…and lots of boy fighters.”

girlfighterSuma Moyung (Kwan) rides into town, offering to rid the locals of a pesky warlord’s son, who is making a nuisance of himself, not least by being a bit rapey. After proving herself by slicing off the shoe-tips of the local police force (!), Suma is given the job, and proceeds to deliver, capturing the scion and bringing him back to face justice. Except, that’s only the start of the problem, because his father is none too happy with Suma, and unleashes his forces to rescue his son, by any means necessary. That covers bribery, threats and then full-on violence as it becomes clear Suma will not be easily cowed. Fortunately, she has help, in the shape of a man (Tien) who lost his entire family to the man she is now guarding. And she’ll need all the assistance she can get, if she’s successfully to transport her captive through the countryside to the state capitol, under siege from the warlord’s forces just about every step of the way.

As that summary perhaps implies, there’s certainly no shortage of action here, with a new fight sequence popping up almost every five minutes. The main problem is that titling your film A Girl Fighter does create certain expectations in your audience – among which would be, that your heroine will be depicted as the most prolific and/or the best martial artist in the movie. Neither are true, with Tien doing most of the heavy lifting for the good guys, against an apparently endless stream of minions in small groups (if the warlord ever actually committed to rescuing his son, he’d easily have the numbers to overpower the hero and heroine!). While not exactly missing in action, too often Suma is reduced to a supporting role, or worse still, left in a situation where she needs the help of her colleague. That’s a shame: while Kwan’s style is a little too theatrical for my tastes (all her punches and kicks appear to start from the next time-zone over), it’s also graceful and flowing, especially impressive when the moves are combined into an extended sequence.

However, the overall sense is of a film more interested in the volume of action, than doing anything particularly new or interesting with it. It seems particularly old-fashioned, considering that this came out the same year (1972) as Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury. As a taste from the tail end of what that hard-hitting style was about to replace, this isn’t bad, and it certainly doesn’t dawdle. But it feels about a decade older than it actually is.

Dir: Yeung Sai Hing
Star: Polly Shang-Kwan, Tien Peng, Law Bun, Cho Kin

The Black Butterfly

  By

★★½
“Given she wears purple, wouldn’t a better title be The Mauve Moth?”

short0448Someone is robbing the rich, and using the proceeds to buy rice for the poor. Could it be the drunken beggar (Yeung) in charge of rice distribution, who is cagey about where his new-found wealth comes from? Or the local inn-owner and former martial arts master (Tien), whose efforts at fund-raising have been rudely rebuffed? Closer. It’s actually his daughter (Chiao), whom no-one knows has any skills at all, but has apparently learned them in secret, and goes out at night, stealing valuables in order to fund the charity operations of her beggar pal. Needless to say, their previous owners are less than happy with this, and are seeking the culprit, led by policeman Xi Lang (Yueh). Things are muddied further when a group of bandits, the engagingly-named Five Devil Rock gang (I think I just found my band name!), steal an imperial seal, forcing the Butterfly’s father out of retirement, and her to reveal herself to save him.

There’s really two halves to this film. The first is, for me, more interesting, though it’s rarely less than obvious Chiao is doubled for any acrobatic work: shot of her jumping, cut to stuntman flying through air, cut to Chiao bending her legs slightly on landing. The style is also defiantly old-school and Peking Opera based, which will come across as stagily artificial to modern eyes, and you do have to remember this was made 45 years ago. However, I did appreciate the long-duration takes, and even though the action quotient was lower, the characters, performances and plot were enough to keep me interested: it plays a little like Iron Monkey, one of my all-time favourite martial arts films, and the idea of a female Robin Hood certainly has enough potential.

Unfortunately, the second half, when the bandits show up and dominate things, is rather less succesful, falling back on a number of old clichés of kung-fu cinema, such as the battle between schools. Until the finale, the heroine is largely reduced to a supporting role, ministering to her poor father, for whom the stress has become too much. While she is more active in said climax, it had me rolling my eyes at its extreme example of the trope where the villains have the good guys outnumbered – literally here, a hundred to one – but attack in ones and twos rather than rushing en masse. Here, it’s even more ridiculous, because the good guy minions beg their leaders to go in first (inevitably, getting their asses kicked), so neither side appear interested in using all their forces. While spectacular enough, I suppose, the end result just doesn’t live up to the early potential.

Dir: Lo Wei
Star: Lisa Chiao Chiao, Yueh Hua, Tien Feng, Yeung Chi Hing

Challenge of the Lady Ninja

  By

★★★
“Well, it’s never dull, at least…”

short0447Chinese woman Wong Siu-Wai (Yeung) is training in the secret arts of ninjitsu, and passes her final test, much to the chagrin of her master’s other star pupil. Immediately afterward, she gets news of her father’s death at the hands of evil collaborator and former fiance Lee Tong (Chen), who works with the Japanese occupying forces. Oh, yeah: did I forget to mention this takes place in World War 2? Because the movie did as well. Anyway, she returns to China and sets about recruiting other, similarly-skilled women, who will be able to help her take revenge. Only, her nemesis has his own minions, who aren’t short on martial arts abilities either, and it’s only through the mysterious help of a masked ally that she is able to avoid an early defeat. Of course, she perseveres, and along the way there are shocking revelations, gratuitous mud-wrestling and a few bars of music apparently lifted directly from Star Wars.

The film can’t decide whether it was to be empowering or exploitative. For every scene of the heroines standing up for themselves and making their own way in the world, there’s one where they are stripped down to their underwear for the flimsiest of reasons. This starts early on, when it appears one of Wong’s ninja skills is to transform from her standard red jump-suit (as shown on the right) into something which looks like a stripper version of Tinkerbell, resulting in all the men around her collapsing with lust. Or there’s the sequence where she fights Lee’s only female bodyguard, who evens the playing-field by emptying an industrial-sized vat of baby oil on it. Or that one of her recruits is a prostitute, whose sole skill is apparently turning men into drooling imbeciles, at the frequent drop of her dress. The virulent anti-Japanese/pro-Chinese tone also gets old, and is kinda odd, since this was a Taiwanese production, so I wouldn’t expect them to be quite so pro-mainland.

That said, the more traditional action is certainly copious and generally fairly well-staged: Yeung is doubled for the more acrobatic elements, but it’s not made hideously obvious, and is helped by the fact that she is doing the rest of the fighting herself, and decently too. The opponents provide an interesting selection, notably the Japanese guy (Robert Tai) with a scorpion tattooed on his head. The revelations mentioned above, do come out of nowhere, and things end so suddenly I had to rewind to try and figure out what the hell just happened: this resulted from the combination of crappy print quality, making the final fight look as if it takes place underground, and the final fight actually taking place underground. Incoherent, surreal and nonsensical? Guilty as charged, m’lud. I probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

Dir: Lee Tso Nam
Star: Elsa Yeung, Kam Yin Fie, Peng Kong, and Chen Kuan-Tai
a.k.a Never Kiss a Ninja, Chinese Super Ninjas 2

Ambitious Kung Fu Girl

  By

★★½
“More ambitious than kung fu”

Tian Si Si (Yim) is a spoiled rich girl, whose doting daddy pays kung fu fighters to give the illusion that she can beat them up. Despite his desire to wed her off in an arranged marriage to Yang Fan (Tak), Si Si runs off to meet her idol, Qing Ge (Chen), a true master of the martial arts, whom she knows only through the fictional tales of derring-do, told by her maid. Susequently, Si Si becomes the target first of con-men, then is sold to a brother, and when they realize who she is, becomes the centre of a scheme to force her into marriage, so her husband can inherit her father’s fortune. Throughout it all, Yang is about the only loyal friend, though when she meets her idol, she discovers that, while if he isn’t as depicted, he still has a courageous streak of his own.

This is clearly intended as a light and frothy confection, not to be taken seriously – witness the gambling contest between Qing Ge and his rival, which has much more in common with a modern game-show than anything from the period. However, the plot is actually smartly written, with enough angles and schemes to keep your head spinning, as you try to figure out who actually wants to help our heroine, and who is against her. I’m not normally a fan of this era of martial arts, often finding the action too obviously-staged. However, this is quite well put together, and I do appreciate camerawork which lets you appreciate the performers’ skills.

Indeed, as a film in general, this would probably rate a star or so higher, and is a fun 90 minutes: my main disappointment is that the heroine is really not the kung fu girl of the title. Apart from the initial encounter with the paid opponents, her “Sloppy Blind Man’s Sword” technique is hardly used. Though there are some other strong female characters – most notably brothel owner Madame Mei (Wong Mei-Mei), who clearly has physical skills beyond what you’d expect from her job – they are largely secondary and/or subservient to the male ones, with the possible exception of courtesan Zhang Hao Er (Choh Seung-Wan), who is certainly her own woman. But overall, entertaining fluff though this is, it only barely qualifies for inclusion here, rather than in our Hall of Misleading Advertising.

Karate Girl (1974)

  By

★★★
“Definitely not to be confused with the Rina Takeda film of the same name.”

This movie acquired some notoriety last year when a clip of a villain’s death went viral as “Worst death scene ever”, even though it had been edited and had extra audio added for “humourous” effect. Certainly, there’s plenty to mock in this 1974 Turkish revenge flick, which plays like someone heard second-hand descriptions of Thriller: A Cruel Picture and decided the world needed a PG remake. However, while aspects of the execution are without a question shoddy and laughable, it has an interesting story, briskly told, and with a good central character.

That heroine is Zeynep (Akin), a mute flower-seller who roams the streets of Istanbul with an apparently endless selection of cue cards through which she converses with customers. Her happy life is disrupted when five escaped convicts invade the home where she lives with her father, killing him and pawing her about, before stealing the money they have saved for a medical operation to return her speech. However, the trauma apparently had the same effect, Zeynep now being able to talk. She vows to track down those responsible and make them pay, with the help of a convenient passing transient, Murat (Hun, who’d go on to become an member of the Turkish parliament), who happens to be well skilled in shooting and martial arts, for reasons that do actually make sense eventually. Zeynap ends up joining the local police force to further her mission, which climaxes on a roof-top where the last member takes a baby hostage.

Apparently unreleased in the US or UK, this is available from the usual dubious sources, most commonly on a print dubbed into English, with French credits and Greek subtitles. Oddly, this adds to the whole package, which succeeds in being more entertaining than you’d expect, in a way best described as “barking mad.” Akin, who was one of the leading lights of Turkish cinema in the sixties and seventies, gives it her all, and certainly has the screen presence to pull it off, even allowing for some of the worst stunt doubling in cinema history – the wig used by her double is a completely different colour. The film manages to be both chaste and sleazy at the same time, with the latter best represented by the bad guys’ facial hair. No-one will ever mistake this for any kind of classic. However, I’ve been less entertained by many movies, and it’s enjoyable enough, for various reasons, that I found it relatively easy to overlook the undeniable flaws.

Dir: Orhan Aksoy
Star: Filiz Akin, Ediz Hun