The Fine Art of Tactical Retreat

10:09 am - In short: The Rescue (1971)

At the beginning of the Mongol Yuan dynasty rule in China, a group of rebels has put it in their minds to free the still loyal prime minister of the Sungs, Wen Tianxiang (Fang Mian) from imprisonment. After some struggles the group finds out that the Mongols are hiding the official in the Celestial Prison, which unfortunately does look more like a very earthly prison.

The rebels, among them their single female member, the young swordswoman Bai Yaerh (Shih Szu), decide that the best way to get Wen out is to get themselves thrown into the jail where some supporters will provide weaponry and keys. Also letting himself into the prison in this very natural way is Le Heru (Lo Lieh). This roguish expert fighter doesn't have heroically dying for his country in mind. Rather, he is using the traditional friendly stalker route trying to win Bai Yaerh's heart.

Le Heru still comes in handy when the plan goes awry and most of the rebels are killed. Thanks to his help, Bai Yaerh belongs to the handful of people who escape the prison with their lives.

Of course, the patriots can't let their project end this way.

The Rescue is a very typical historical Shaw Brothers wuxia. The word typical shouldn't be read as "not worthwhile", on the contrary, the typical (historical or not) Shaw Brothers wuxia of this phase of the studio's life was really a rather good film.

The production line method of filmmaking has a bad reputation (mostly among people who have never seen many films made this way), but in the case of the Shaw Brothers the production line mostly lead to a very solid technical base from which to work. So director San Kong had a solid professional cast, solid professional fight choreography, solid professional sets and so on, and so on. If it sounds as if I was trying to say that The Rescue is a lot like dozens of other Shaw Brothers films, then, well, yes I am in fact saying it. That however is not a bad thing, because I most probably liked these dozens of other films.

A few things here are a little different, though. First and foremost, Lo Lieh wasn't allowed to play heroic roles very often, and seems to relish the possibility. He also works nicely with Shih Szu, who herself is really good as the extremely competent swordswoman with the tendency to upperclass petulance. Besides the mandatory looking pretty, which was not much of a problem for her, she also seems to have done quite a bit of her fighting herself, and did it well, which not every Shaw heroine did or was allowed to do.

Some of the mass fights are also worth mentioning for their well developed sense of controlled chaos and proper use of the typical Shaw-colored blood.

Add to that the more low key way the film treats its mandatory patriotic speeches, a love for people in disguise, a choice misuse of "Also sprach Zarathustra" and a very undignified patriotic sacrificial death for one of the main characters, and you'll find me completely on the side of your film.

09:56 am - Three Films Make A Post: My Sister Is A Werewolf

Rest Stop: Don't Look Back (2008): aka We're not stinking calling it Rest Stop 2.

While I had quite a bit of fun with John Shiban's Rest Stop as a neat, weird and focused if unoriginal little B movie, its sequel is just a retread of the first one with every flaw maximized. It's especially lacking in the sense of strangeness the first film achieved from time to time, and replaces it with a bit more torture. Note to filmmakers: torture without emotional context makes for a boring movie.

The slightly larger cast isn't used too well either and mostly helps to make the film feel bloated and unfocused. And the ending does make no fucking sense whatsoever.

High Plains Invaders (2009): Alien CGI effects that everyone calls "bugs" although they look nothing like bugs attack a Western town. Tragic train robber James Marsters and his small band of survivors fight back.

Typically depressive SciFi Channel stuff, held a mile away from being entertaining in any way or form by the usual: sloppy direction, sloppy editing, sloppy script and sloppy acting (with Marsters and female lead Cindy Sampson as exceptions I'm at least willing to call professional). Of course the effects and the actors never seem to actually interact, of course the film ignores everything it could have learned from the history of B-movies, of course it wastes a fun basic idea. It's so sloppy and just plain lazy that I'd even rather watch the Western episodes of the revived Outer Limits again.

Filial Son (1975): If you have seen your share of Taiwanese wuxia films, you'll more or less know the plot of this one. It's the usual vengeance business, with unagreeably little weirdness and an agreeable interest in its female characters.

The few words about this on the 'net are quite negative, but I found the film to be quite solid. It is true, Mo Man-Hung's direction is neither subtle nor does it ever deviate from genre standards. Fortunately, I happen to like the genre standard.

The film is cheaply but solidly made, with nice enough acting and unexceptional fights, and while I have seen this sort of story told about a million times - and often better - Filial Son is entertaining enough for what it is, unless you expect every film to be a timeless masterpiece.

09:57 am - In short: Iron Mistress (1969)

aka Iron Petticoat

The swordswoman known as the Iron Mistress (Han Hsiang-Chin) leads a merry band of Sung Chinese against their unloved new Mongolian overlords.

They are not real patriotic revolutionaries, though, but more a bandit gang that does only care for certain group of victims, and not every member of the group is as high-minded as their leader.

For that reason, the enemies of the mistress aren't putting as much effort into catching her and her men as they could if they'd take them as a real threat to the Mongol dominion. Until the gang frees some of their captured men who are supposed to be beheaded, that is. After this, the efforts to capture them get a bit more enthusiastic.

Now that the authorities have put their minds to it, it's not too difficult to find the Mistress' mountain hide-out, and even easier to pick a date for an ambush; if you are evil, you are bound by law to disrupt a wedding.

The core quartet of fighters escapes from the cowardly attack and does not decide to take bloody vengeance (that would be exciting), but rather to learn from a local scholar how to be more responsible patriots.

Iron Mistress really isn't the most exciting of Taiwanese wuxia films. Far from the mad, madly entertaining excesses of Weird Fu, but equally distant from the artfulness of someone like King Hu, this really deserves the description "bog standard".

It's not a bad film in any way, instead everything about it - from fight choreography to acting - is perfectly solid and mindnumbingly bland, giving new proof to my pet theory of mediocrity, not ineptness, being the  main enemy of entertainment.

It is even more of a shame that most of the film is so dreadfully boring when one takes a look at its production values. Far from the quarry-based martial arts films one tends to connect with Taiwan, this one has some nice locations and some good looking sets, but it refuses to make good use of them.

As regular readers might have noticed, I find competent, mediocre films like Iron Mistress exceedingly difficult and frustrating to talk about, because there really isn't much of interest to say about them. All elements you'd usually associate with a decent film are present, but not one of those elements has enough character to make it worth talking about.

10:19 am - Swordsman (1990)

When a retired official of the Chinese Emperor steals a scroll containing the secrets of an invincible form of martial arts from one of those notoriously evil and hard to kill eunuchs (Lau Shun) to ensure the future of his children, the plan backfires a little.

Soon, he and his family are slaughtered by the Eunuch's henchpeople (among them Jackie Cheung in one of his few outings as an evil bastard). Before he dies, the official can just inform Ling Wu Chung (Sam Hui), the pupil of his friend, the leader of the Wa Mountain School (Lau Siu-Ming) of the scroll's hiding place and ask the young man to deliver the secret to his son.

Of course, this being a wuxia and all, what should be an easy delivery of a small piece of information turns into a quest of epic proportions with double-crosses, the song that won't ever go away, snake throwing, girls badly disguised as boys and more flying people than in the last general meeting of the Marvel Universe. Limbs will be torn, hearts will be broken and honor sacrificed to ambition.

Swordsman obviously had quite a troubled production history, but the accounts I found of it are so inconsistent that I don't think it prudent to go into it too much. Let's just stay with the fact that the HKMDB lists six directors for the film - King Hu (who is the official director going by the titles), Tsui Hark, Ching Siu-Tung, Ann Hui, Andrew Kam and Raymond Lee. At a guess and based on my knowledge of their other films I would say that most of the movie was directed by Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung, with a few scattered scenes (the rather melancholic moments in the first half of the film come to mind) by King Hu, but it's impossible to know for sure. What I can say for sure is that the film is very much a new wave wuxia as one would expect of Hark and Ching.

For a film directed by just about everyone, Swordsman stays surprisingly consistent in tone and content. It is a little complicated for the uninitiated, perhaps even convoluted, but that has always been the wuxia way of storytelling. "Let's just throw as much of everything on the screen as possible, and do it well, and let the audience (with the knowledge of the novels our films are based on) do the rest", seems to be the main thrust of the philosophy behind these films, and usually - as well as in this case - this works out well even for people not familiar with the sources.

While Swordsman's plot is complicated, it is quite comprehensible when one sets one's mind on understanding it, this time even with quite clearly understandable character motivations, but - and that's one of the aspects I love about this genre the most - the film works perfectly well as a string of little marvels; just going with the flow is as pleasant as understanding everything.

One of the deepest pleasures of this phase of wuxia filmmaking lies in the way the complex plotting and the incessant motion of the fight scenes are intertwined, making the flying and spiraling people with the superhuman powers and the archetypal psychology the logical consequence of the shifting world they find themselves in.

Swordsman seems to me like a perfect specimen of its genre, with wonders and small, lovely moments of humanity to spare that quietly tell the story of a bunch of young people declining to become like their elders.

10:04 am - A Girl Fighter (1972)

The Kim family dominates a province in ancient China through the force of their supreme martial arts and lots and lots of money.

The worst of the family is Kim junior, Kim ten-jiao. When he gets it into his head to rape the female head of household of the Lio family and her husband, the rest of the family of course still tries to protect her. Alas, he kills them all, including the woman.

The local magistrate, especially after he has been pressured by higher-ups in the bureaucratic hierarchy, would very much like to arrest the younger Kim for this deed, but the people in the area are so afraid he just can't find anyone willing and able to do the arresting. Until Sima Mu-rong (Polly Kuan) appears, that is. The young woman is just burning to help bring Kim to justice. The magistrate is afraid of her girl cooties at first, but a short demonstration of her martial arts convinces him that she is the right woman for the job. It should always be this easy.

Later, we will re-learn the lesson that people in wuxias are blind in any case and have difficulty to parse someone looking like Polly Kuan (with make-up and all) as a woman as soon as she dons male clothing, so Polly could just have spared herself the trouble and pretended to be a boy from the beginning. Ah, the glories of cross-dressing!

The arrest itself isn't too difficult. Sima outclasses Kim quite easily, but the real trouble begins afterwards. Sima and a handful of guards have to transport Kim the long way to court. Kim senior is not going to stop at anything, even the theft of the magistrate's official seal, to get his son back.

Help for our heroine comes in the form of the slaughtered Lio family's nephew (Tien Peng). At first, he plans to kill the prisoner himself, but quickly adjusts his goals when he realizes the efforts the elder Kim makes to put a stop to Sima.

A Girl Fighter is another Taiwanese wuxia made by people from the surroundings of King Hu's Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch of Zen. Director Yeung Sai-Hing was the production manager of those films, and the first half of A Girl Fighter makes at times quite clear why he didn't work as a director too often. The film starts out rather lackluster, hitting all the right genre beats without making much use of them. Especially the fight sequences are a minor disappointment, seemingly filmed to look as fake as humanly possible with some dreadful wire work that lets the fighters resemble nothing so much as bumble bees, making this part of the film a swell example of the deadly bumble bee fu style so feared in ancient China.

Surprisingly, the second half of the film very suddenly picks up the slack by transforming itself into a variation of a Howard Hawks western with a neat siege sequence and a rather exciting trek through trapped enemy territory. The fights start to look a lot more convincing too and the whole tone of the film shifts into a much tenser and darker direction, until it all culminates in the sort of grand finale Cheng Cheh usually traded in - although seemingly edited with a butter knife.

Even before the action of the film gets watchable, the exciting phenomenon known as Polly (Shan) Kuan, as well as the less exciting, yet dependable phenomenon that is Tien Peng, should be enough to keep one watching. What I find so wonderful about her is the determination she brought to everything she did. No matter if it was a "normal" wuxia like this one, a nice and friendly kung fu comedy or the sheer insanity of many of her later works, Polly brought the same amount of energy to every movie she acted in. She was game for just about anything, and automatically elevated each of her movies into the "entertaining" category through sheer presence, even in those cases when she was the only good thing about her films.

09:28 am - Son of Three Films Make A Post

Ong bak 2 (2008): Despite a troubled production history and a certain stubborn resistance of the film against involving its viewers emotionally, Tony Jaa's & Panna Rittikrai's nominal sequel to the film that brought Thai martial arts cinema into the view of a Western mainstream audience delivers an infectious flow of truly awesome action sequences. People fearful of abrupt, open endings which ask the viewer to pray for a film's protagonist should probably beware, though. But if you like your martial arts films as physical experiences, this is not to be missed.

Rider of Revenge (1971): Quite a few people - among them house favorite Polly (Shan) Kuan as morally upright swordswoman and always dependable Tien Peng - are after the rather fearful murderer Ting after he has been broken out of jail. Some of them want his hidden loot to pay for their hundreds of henchmen, some of them to finance disaster relief (no, really), while Polly of course only seeks justice and Tien Peng is on a ma-related mission Bollywood would approve of. While all of this probably won't rock your world, fine acting and solid fighting still make for an entertaining Taiwanese wuxia.

Zinda Laash (1967): A Pakistani version of Horror of Dracula, with some striking black and white photography that reminds me of expressionist silent movies. Interestingly, the film is set in contemporary Pakistan, quite unlike most of its Western brethren's fixation on the Victorian era. It even culminates in a car chase. Only the needle-dropped soundtrack lets the film down sometimes: a jazz version of "La Cucaracha" does not for an ominous mood make. The musical numbers are fine, though.

09:51 am - Bloody Parrot (1981)

Well, let's explain this "bloody parrot" business first, shall we? You see, when the demon king has his birthday (presumably on Friday the 13th), his chief minion demons gift him their blood. The blood takes on the form of a (bloody) parrot and grants everyone it meets three wishes.

Back here on earth, the Prince of Dian somehow loses the treasure he was supposed to send as tribute to the emperor, and his servants have to start a hasty search. While traipsing through the woods at night, one patrol is suddenly bathed in blinding red light. It's that bloody parrot!

After laser parrot has randomly killed a few people, the bad-tempered bird grants the leader of the Prince's men, Guo Fan (Kwan Fung) his three wishes. Guo Fan obviously wishes the treasure back, but hasn't read The Monkey's Paw and does therefore look quite surprised when he not only gets the treasure back, but also finds that his son has been killed. The next logical step is to wish his son back, of course. His wife, gifted with a greater amount of intelligence than her husband, can't hinder him from making this ill-advised second wish, and has to kill hubby before their son can climb out of his urn when he refuses to use his third wish to undo the potential zombie apocalypse. Logically, she then commits suicide. At the same moment as Guo Fan dies, the treasure suddenly disappears again. In the following weeks, hordes of martial artists descend upon the area, all in search of the parrot and/or the treasure, yet also very eager to just kill each other for no good reason.

Also on the lookout for the bloody bird is Tie Hen the Merciless (Lau Wing), who seems to be some sort of cop. Being a cop (and merciless) doesn't safe him from parrot attacks, though, and very soon he is also quite dead, dying in the arms of the swordsman Ye Ting Feng (Jason Pai Piao) who might or might not be an old acquaintance and promises him to take his dead body back to the border. Which Ye Ting Feng probably plans on doing right after he has dragged Tie Hen (in his coffin, don't fret) through half of China in search of parrot and treasure. The film has finally settled on a protagonist! So, granted certain death exemptions by the divine right of the protag, the swordsman starts his investigation following a nonsensical clue into the Parrot Brothel - fortunately not a place where men pay to sleep with parrots. From there, his new prostitute love Xue Nu (Jenny Leung) and he start a series of bizarre adventures, full of people who want to kill Ye Ting Feng and abduct Xue Nu, bizarre poisons, demonic possession, cannibalism, worm boy, a "doll face killer needle lady" (her embroidery needle is deadly), vampires, naked fu, underground mirror labyrinths, the works, until it all finally ends in a perfectly natural explanation for all the nonsense that has been going on. Of course, this "explanation" makes even less sense than most of what happened before, but oh well.

Hua Shan might not have directed many films for the Shaw Brothers, or any film that made much sense, but I find it difficult to call the man who directed this thing here as well as the immortal Super Inframan anything else but a demented genius of hysterical enthusiasm.

Bloody Parrot is part of the effort of the late period Shaw Brothers studio to win back its audience from the younger, sexier Cantonese speaking studios by making wild genre mixtures of dubious sanity. In this case, it's a wuxia in Chor Yuen's style, just much less carefully filmed, but with more gore, worms, vomit, breasts and other exploitative elements,mostly playing out like a horror film with lots of fighting.

The script by good old (N)i Kuang (if you don't know, that's the man who wrote about eighty percent of the Shaw Brothers' output) does not make a lick of sense, but Hua Shan's direction is so giddy, and the pace in which one damn thing after another happens (and then another, and another - it truly doesn't ever stop) so relentless that it's impossible not to just jump with it from a naked kung fu fight with a demon-possessed Xue Nu to the next half a dozen bizarros who want to kill Ye Ting Feng while he's gone out to buy some paint (don't ask) to an improbable (but bava-coloured) underground cave. Resistance to a film that even uses a mirror labyrinth as a reason to undress its female lead is futile in any case.

The rest of the film is mostly an amphetamine driven version of Shaw standards, with acting performances as solid as possible in a film where the viewer mostly never learns who these damn guys are, or what motives they have, and fighting that could probably have been choreographed a little more creatively, but hardly more enthusiastic. The well-known sets used in this completely stage-bound affair have seen better days, though.

And while other films in the Shaw catalogue like Buddha's Palm might be even more bonkers, a film that has dialogue lines like "The skin from the seven of you is just enough to make me a skirt" should be weird enough to make anyone happy.

09:43 am - The Angry River (1971)

The martial world is struck by a series of cowardly attacks with poison darts. A large part of the survivors of the good clans meets up in the castle of the Lan to discuss how to find the perpetrator of the dastardly deeds.

The poisoner is no sloth, though, and attacks Master Lan right in his own castle, leaving the man on his deathbed. His only hope for survival is something called the Black Herb, a magically potent remedy that can only be found in Soul Valley.

The few martial artists who volunteer for the long and arduous journey to retrieve the Black Herb barely make it out of the castle's door before their hidden enemy strikes and kills them, until Master Lan's daughter Lan Feng (a very young Angela Mao) is the only fighter capable, willing and left standing.

The tough young woman has to trek through some of the more dangerous parts of China. with unsubtle but fitting names like the Angry River (a better name for it would have been "The Explody River", by the way) or the Merciless Pass, while fighting off the thugs and goons Poison Dart (Pai Ying) sends after her. Using a judicious amount of martial arts and willpower, Lan Feng overcomes these obstacles and arrives at her destination. Arriving at Soul Valley turns out to be not enough, though.

The resident hermit (I think played by Fung Ngai) insists on his visitors going through another series of tests (including a short but awesome tyrannosaurus rhino fight). Lan Feng doesn't do too well here, but the hermit is impressed enough by her courage and daughterly sense of duty that he offers her a dose of the Herb if she allows him to rob her of her martial powers. Being the good daughter that she is, the heroine agrees.

Now in possession of the herb, Lan Feng "only" has to return back home without any way to overcome anything more dangerous than a fly in combat and in the possession of a magical herb that not only heals all known poisons but can also be used to double a person's martial prowess. It's not difficult to imagine that there is quite a lot of people willing to kill for the possession of something like this, and soon Lan Feng is on the run from every thug and bad guy around.

Her toughness and intelligence will have to be enough to help her out of more than one tight spot. Fortunately, she also meets the chivalrous swordsman Leng Yu-Han (Kao Yuen) who is more than willing to lend her a hand and his sword.

The Angry River is an early Golden Harvest production with a very young Angela Mao in the lead, and there are more than enough people on the net willing to tell you that it is not an especially interesting or worthwhile film, being made some time before the production house's and the actress' prime.

I'll have to disagree with that quite a bit. Sure, the plot is bog-standard wuxia fare, but - as is so often the case with genre films - its qualities are lying in the execution of well-known elements.

And when it comes to the execution, there's not much I don't find praiseworthy (or, if not praiseworthy, then at least charming) about The Angry River. Mao's performance is not a subtle one, but it is as intense and enthusiastic as one could wish for, making the young and rather headstrong (in a good way) heroine the center of the film even when the script doesn't always trust her to be. The rest of the acting is solid throughout, the fighting performances are energetic, while the fights themselves are about as creatively choreographed as one expects (and sometimes surprisingly bloody).

What really makes the film though is Wong Fung's direction. When he is not overusing the camera's zoom lens, he's occupied with some spectacularly framed location shots, using natural light as beautifully as anyone I can think of, with nary a moment that isn't gorgeous in one way or the other.

But friends of cave sets (and who likes swordplay movies and isn't!?) won't be too disappointed. There is a short yet sweet scene in a rather pretty flower cave with pool and dinosaur that somehow fits tonally quite well into the less artificial looking world that makes up the rest of the film.

Most of the time, The Angry River is a semi-realistic wuxia film with only slight supernatural elements, but there are some short bursts of the sort of moments you'd usually find in a Weird Fu movie (yes, the dinosaur thing again, but also interesting geography like the Angry River itself), giving the film a judicious amount of spice.

It is really a rather exciting film, but one I find relatively difficult to write up as enthusiastically as it deserves, because it mostly does what you'd expect of a film of its type and period. It just does it exceedingly well.

So, if you are at all interested in wuxia movies, there's just no excuse not to grab the dirt cheap Joy Sales DVD and have some fun.

12:27 pm - A City Called Dragon (1969)

China, 1193. At the moment, the (this time transcribed as) Jin dynasty rules China, while the followers of the displaced Han are plotting a revolution.

Chang, the mayor of an unnamed city, is secretly on the side of the Han. Unfortunately his secrecy doesn't amount to much and he gets himself killed. His replacement (Shih Jun), a man who betrayed the Han cause for the Jin years ago, doesn't hesitate and merrily slaughters the dead man's family and friends, too.

Some time later, a certain Miss Shang (Hsu Feng) comes to town. She is an agent of the Han, instructed to obtain some never defined "secret papers" that contain some plans of the rebels (written by General McGuffin, I suppose).

The swordswoman is as capable and determined as they come, yet even she will have great difficulties to obtain the papers, cut through a net of double-crosses or just to stay alive, especially when she makes an attempt on the life of the new mayor and learns the hard way that there is always someone better than yourself in the martial world.

A City Called Dragon easily invites the comparison to the films of King Hu, seeing that it was directed by an assistant director of the older film, utilizes some of Hu's core actors and (surely a sign of the times when this was made) film stock. This comparison is neither fair to Hu nor to City's director Larry Tu Chong-Hsun, though.

While Tu's film lacks much of the brilliance of Hu's work and Tu is not sharing Hu's interest in exploring the morality of his characters, the younger director is also trying to take his wuxia into a very different direction from Hu's.

His main influences seem to be Japanese chambara and the Spaghetti Western, so he merrily utilizes some typical visual techniques of both genres. The uncomfortably close close-up stands next to dialogue scenes shot from knee-height upwards, stands next to belly-cam (=the state of affairs when the camera mostly seems to focus on the actors' bellies) stands next to a very Japanese way of shooting fights with the camera positioned behind objects so that the actual fighting is taking place in the background.

At times, especially in the first half of the film, these techniques are surprisingly effective to heighten the film's tension, at other times they  just seem to be weird for weirdness' sake (nothing I'm in the business of criticizing too heavily).

Speaking of fighting, friends of the wuxia film will probably be a little disappointed by the small amount of fights and their respective shortness (the latter again very chambara), as well as Tu's habit of being more interested in the framing of the fights than in the fighting itself.

Actually, there's not only not much fighting going on, there is relatively little else happening, even the melodrama is pared down, leaving the always wonderful lead actors with relatively little to do. The fact that the script isn't doing new-fangled stuff like character development surely is not helping.

Still, A City Called Dragon has something - Tu's angling for weird camera angles? the surprisingly awesome use of the colour brown? the "how the hell are we going to end this thing?" ending? - that presses me into a making it a minor recommendation for friends of Taiwanese martial arts movies.

In any case, it is a much better film than some of the quarry based fare that got churned out in Taiwan at the same time.

06:24 pm - The Lady Hermit (1971)

A young (and I mean really, really young) woman named Cui Ping (Shih Szu) is searching for a mysterious swordswoman, the Lady Hermit, whom she deems to be the only teacher worth learning from. Cui Ping plans to become a good enough fighter to challenge the current "Number One In The Martial World", Black Demon (Wang Hsieh), who is a right bastard. It's not as if it was personal between Cui Ping and Black Demon - she lacks the expected backstory about murdered parents and is instead driven by a combination of youthful arrogance and just as youthful righteousness. Not a bad combination in a woman brandishing a whip and a sword.

Said woman is more than on the right trail to find her heroine - she has already met her in the form of a maid (Cheng Pei Pei) working at the escort service Cui Ping has made the base for her search. Leng Yu Shuang, as the Hermit's real name is, has been laying low there for a few years to recover from a grievous wound to her hip she suffered when fighting (and losing against) Black Demon.

Also working for the escort service is Chang Chun (Lo Lieh in one of his knightly roles), soon to be one third of a love triangle between the heroines, and really not of much other use.

To make matters a little more complicated, Black Demon's henchmen have slowly closed in on the Lady Hermit and are concocting their own version of a protection money racket - led by someone claiming to be the heroine (just with a lot more beard) to flush the original out. So the rest of the film's plot should be more or less obvious.

If someone could explain the reason for the bizarre differences in quality and style of the films of The Lady Hermit's director Meng Hua Ho to me, it would be very much appreciated. How it is possible that the man responsible for The Oily Maniac and Mighty Peking Man was just a few years earlier making an excellent wuxia like this is beyond me. Who knew how good he was in making the best of location shots? Or making real neat looking action scenes?

Of course, The Lady Hermit is a very formulaic film, but that's one of the reason we call movies like it "genre movies". The question in a case like this is: how well does a film use the formulae of his genre and (if the genre is already getting decadent one way or the other) how does it twist them? The former does not seem to have been a problem for Meng Hua Ho at all - the movie contains everything one expects of a non-mad wuxia, realized in as dynamic and exciting ways as possible. The fights are as well choreographed as they are bloody, which is no surprise in a Shaw Brothers film, of course, but also show a fine sense for action set pieces like a fight on a suspension bridge (including really bad model effects - always a plus) that some people in Hollywood would go on to steal a few years later for that film with the permanently screeching woman, or, as we call it, the Anti-Lady-Hermit.

The twist in the genre formula is the consequent way in which the film substitutes typical male roles with female characters and vice versa - not completely atypical for the wuxia, but seldom played this straight and unflinching. Also, Lo Lieh as Damsel With A Sword In Distress really is something.

And speaking of "really being something", there are our heroines. Cheng Pei Pei was a much more accomplished actress at this point in her career than in her earliest years (and keep in mind she was only 25 when this film was made) and this is surely one of her best performances. Where many wuxia heroes tend to be rather bland, she projects a rare mixture of determination, competence, fragility and humor combined with the ability to kill people with tea cups.

Shih Szu, only 16 here, mostly lives off youthful charm, but what could be a problem in other roles becomes a believable part of her character here.

All in all, there's no reason to miss this, unless you're on of those people who are categorically against watching really good films.

08:02 pm - The Ghost Hill (1971)

Two swordsmen, the absurdly straight and knightly Shadow Tsai (Tien Peng) and the rather more dubious Black Dragon Fung (Tong Wai) are fighting a duel for the title of "Sword King" as well as the possession of a blade called the "Purple Light Magic Sword". Fung wins the fight, but only because Tsai is so fair that he isn't willing to strike down his enemy while he can't see his sword, so the resident martial arts master gives title and sword to Tsai. A slightly disgruntled Fung and a very happy Tsai go their ways.

Tsai needs the sword for something different than prestige - it's the only way to take revenge on the killer of his father (and we're not going to learn about the why and wherefore of that death), whose skin is supposed to be impervious to weapons and who also is a fearsome fighter even with the little handicaps of being old and blind. He is also protected by his daughter Swallow (Polly Kuan), an effective swordswoman in her own right.

Such a simple tale of revenge wouldn't be enough for a film very much in the spirit of the Chor Yuen school of the wuxia film and so the house of Tsai's master is attacked by a strange group of fighters. One of them pretends to be Fung - and really, who else would have a motive to kill Tsai's master and make off with the Purple Light Magic Sword?

At the same time, Tsai's potential revenge victim, who is also - as we will learn a little later - the teacher of Fung, is attacked and killed by a strange group of fighters pretending to work for Tsai.

All this devious killing is part of the plan of a certain King Gold (Sit Hon, yes, having his skin painted golden) to get Fung and Tsai to kill each other, because he...um, you got me there. Wants to piss off the best swordsmen around? Well, he is a man who has lots and lots of other things to do: Raping women (thankfully off-screen) while wearing his pet parrot on his shoulder, taking baths in scalding hot water, throwing his servants into said water, shooting people with his harpoon arm, laughing evilly after every second sentence he says etc, etc, so it is all too explainable why not every single one of his plans can be a hit.

This one turns out especially badly for King Gold. Instead of causing at least one dead swordsman, his plan only leads to Fung, Tsai and Swallow talking things through (after some drama and fighting of course) and combining their efforts against Gold (whom, as I'd like to emphasize, they held no grudges against before he tried to mess with them).

Of course, all this is not complicated enough at all, so what about a little emotional trouble? So, Swallow is in love with Tsai, Tsai is probably (he is the strong silent and slightly stupid type) in love with Swallow, and Fung is very definitely in love with Swallow and also rather jealous of Tsai being such a swell and well-loved guy.

Still not complicated enough? Alright, King Gold also has a daughter named Gia (Hon Seung Kam), who is also a little in love with Tsai - and, as it turns out, not King Gold's daughter at all, but the daughter of a dead enemy, taken in and raised as Gold's daughter to be married by the golden madman as soon as she's old enough (and can I get an "Ewww" here?). Turns out this is going to be a good reason for her uniting with the other three swordspeople against him. It was probably not Goldie's best idea to teach her the art of fighting.

As you can see, there are a lot of plot points to resolve until our heroes can attack King Gold's mountain with the help of a lot of guys we didn't meet before, go through his creatively trapped (ice! fire! poison!) Ten Gates of Death and kick his ass.

The Ghost Hill (and I don't have a clue why the film is called that way) is a rather fine example of the slightly mad wuxia type beloved Chor Yuen pioneered. Taiwanese director Shan-si Ting was no Chor Yuen, to be sure, as he was missing Yuen's incredible sense of color, framing and use of sets, but his film should be a lot of fun even for people not completely in love with the wuxia genre. The film goes along at the slightly mad pace these things should have - fast enough to confuse the average viewer with its quite complicated plot line and the merry bunch of characters. But really, why should a film have just one old master when it can have three (or is it four? I'm not sure anymore)? The same goes for bearded evildoers and death traps.

Many of the Taiwanese wuxias I know have a little trouble keeping their intensity up when the fighting stops and the melodrama starts. This is not a problem here, thanks to a very well-cast and well-played core of characters. For once, even the chemistry between the love interests is as it should be. That everyone knows how to look good in the not brilliantly but well choreographed fights is a given in any case. The characterization is of course more archetypal than deep, but all four heroes are in the hands of actors who know how to make an archetype come alive. My favorite though is Sit Hon's King Gold, with his permanent belly-laugh and his parrot - and a lair that is probably the historical source for every place those Hindi villains are inhabiting.

I wouldn't really know what to criticize about the film if not for the fight scene between Swallow and Gia which is partly sped-up in the most irritating and obvious way possible - and for no good reason, since other fights show both actresses to be more than capable enough to provide a good fight without this kind of non-trickery.

07:14 pm - Holy Flame of the Martial World (1983)

It's an old story: a pair of star-crossed lovers with two children knows where the secret creed of the Holy Flame of the martial world is hidden. The chiefs of every martial arts clan of mythic ancient China want that secret, so they hunt the two down and kill them in a fit of overenthusiasm. The children miraculously survive some of baby fu (which is the technical term for fighting with a baby on your back) - the male one is rescued by The Phantom (Philip Kwok) who comes too late to be of help to the babies' parents, while the female one has the dubious luck of becoming the adoptive daughter of Tsin Yin (Leanne Lau), head of the Er Mei Clan and one of the killers.

Eighteen years later, the Phantom sends the boy who has (somewhat) grown into the not exactly spectacular form of Max Mok to retrieve the Holy Flame and take vengeance on the killers of his parents.

Nobody knows that there are actually two Holy Flames, a yin and a yang version, one only useable by an eighteen year old male virgin, the other by a female one. Soon each twin has one of the weapons. Will they kill each other with the the things, or will they slaughter the bad guys?

Holy Flame of the Martial World is a late period Shaw Brothers film and as such one thing first and foremost: a bizarre construction out of the maddest elements possible.

Sure, the underlying vengeance tale is an old hat in the martial arts and wuxia genres, but moments of earnest melodrama have to take a backseat when scores of bizarre characters attack each other with everything the Weird Fu sub-genre loves (except - inexplicably - midgets). Good old Philip Kwok uses what could very well be my all-time favorite fighting technique, the "Ghostly Laughter". Just imagine him with one of those bad white wigs that are supposed to signify age on his head, sitting in front of his enemies and laughing heartily. So heartily in fact, that his laughter causes an enormous storm which blows his enemies away (unless they "seal their energy flow"). It's enormously silly to look at, and I highly approve.

Most of the film is like that. It throws as much weirdness at its viewer as possible, most of it without anything amounting to an explanation. But really, what explanation could there be for Golden Snake Boy being played by a girl (and who is he/she anyway?) or for the Blood-Sucking Clan whose members are always on the lookout for female virgins to feed them to an English-speaking green corpse?

Or for the fact that the Holy Flames look very much like cheap plastic toys, until they grow and our heroes fly on them, that is? And, now that I think of it, did you know that coming into contact with a special snake bladder will give you the power of the Magic Finger?

With so much bizarre awesomeness thrown at me as fast as possible, I was even able to ignore the obvious flaws of the film - like Max Mok's complete lack of charisma and the ram-shackle state some of the sets were in. I just hadn't time for small change like this while watching a film with flying mirror balls.

Current Mood: sleepy

05:42 pm - The Twelve Gold Medallions (1970)

The Chinese Empire is under attack by the Tartars. While heroic general Yue slowly takes the lost territory back piece by piece, the traitorous prime minister plans on selling out to the invaders. Yue's success is a problem for his plans, so he acquires a royal order that will call Yue back from the front and leave the way open for his newly made allies. To make sure the order really arrives, the minister orders it engraved on twelve gold medallions, each of which will be transported to the frontline by a martial arts expert of great talent and dubious morality.

There's more than one patriotic fighter who wants to prevent the order's delivery. Especially effective in getting rid of the mercenaries is Miao Lung (Yueh Huah), a former student of the sword style of Jin Yang Tan (Cheng Miu). Little does he suspect that his master has heard the siren song of power and influence and has just been awarded the leadership of the martial arts school whose main reason for existence is the delivery of the medallions.

As soon as he learns this, Miao Lung's sense of duty and honor compels him to break up his engagement to Jin Yang Tan's daughter Jin Suo (Chin Ping). Her father uses the opportunity to convince the girl that Miao Lung has fallen in love with another woman.

Both men don't know that Jin Suo herself has also gotten into the medallion interception business.

If you think this should be enough complications for one film, you probably haven't seen many wuxias. The film finds time - without breaking a sweat, I must add - to also concern itself with the destiny of many other honorable and dishonorable fighters, betrayal and tragedies and even with a little comic relief.

But it is doubtful that the story will end in laughter and not in blood and tears.

Cheng Kang may not be as well known a Shaw Brothers director as Chor Yuen or Chang Cheh, but this doesn't make his films necessarily less interesting or less individual efforts.

The Twelve Gold Medallions for example is a film that tries to re-invent the classic wuxia formula in a way very different from Chor Yuen. Where Chor opts for conscious artificiality and stylization, Cheng uses a more naturalistic approach with as much location shooting as possible and stages that are (quite effectively) filmed to look as natural as possible.

The fight choreography is in part done by Sammo Hung and has a certain grittiness even in its more wacky moments. Most of the fights are relatively short, but bloody and intense. The high amount of different fighters helps to keep each battle unique, while Cheng's dynamic and fast camera work adds a further dimension of intensity to the proceedings.

The action is of course not all that's important in a wuxia. The Twelve Gold Medallions is not stingy with its melodrama and entwines it nicely with the action. Where weaker genre entries too often keep the emotionally tense moments and the action divorced from each other, here the melodrama lends additional tension to the action and is used to up the stakes so that more interesting things than the fate of a nation are in the center of the movie.

Acting and production values are as good as one can expect from a Shaw Brothers film. I must say I would have preferred less hissy fits by Jin Suo, whose childish behavior is unfortunately not untypical for women in films like this, but if it says something very positive about a film when that's the worst criticism I can come up with.

Current Mood: content

05:44 pm - In short: Deaf Mute Heroine (1971)

This is the second film directed by Hong Kong all-round talent Wu Ma (he acts! he directs! he sings! he choreographs action sequences! he writes!). It's a low-budget high-intensity wuxia about the titular Deaf Mute Heroine (played with grim determination by Helen Ma) whose hobby is to kill off the local bandit population and steal their ill-gotten gains.

When she kills Shirley Wong's brother, the bandit leader, gambling house boss and poison expert swears vengeance.

The Heroine survives the first of Wong's traps, but is wounded by a poisoned throwing dart. A simple dyer finds her and nurses her back to health. Of course, they fall in love. But when he can't borrow enough money for their wedding (and is too stupid to even tell his future wife about the problem), he lets himself get talked into some very ill-advised things by a colleague, leading his fiancé into another trap.

Deaf Mute Heroine is a film with an undeserved life as an obscurity that's hard to find in any form at all; even more difficult in a watchable form. It's worth every hoop you have to jump through to see it, though. Its production values may lie somewhere below the cost of a sandwich, but it makes up for what it lacks in well-built sets and costly props with a roughness and energy that's quite exhilarating. Nowhere is this more clear than in the fight scenes. Sure, I have seen much prettier choreography, but the rawness these scenes have fits the surprising amount of spurting blood and the basic brutality of the fights perfectly. Wu Ma certainly didn't lack ideas how to make the violence more interesting. The neat moments begin with our heroine being blinded by the sun reflected on enemy shields and instead using her foe's shadow to fight him and end with some creatively absurd sword jump moves in the grand finale.

Aesthetically the film has a grimy and dirty look that works well with Wu Ma's heavy use of handheld camera, zooms and every other technique mainstream film critics hate; all this makes for a very energetic film.

The acting doesn't let the viewer down either. Especially Helen Ma and Shirley Wong give their not very thoroughly developed roles depth through sheer presence. Not a small feat when you keep in mind that Ma doesn't even have any dialogue. Even the cliched love story works well and seems to be based on a natural attraction between two people who aren't used to being treated well by others.

08:39 pm - The Sword (1980)

This is going to get a wee bit complicated. A swordsman called Li Mak-Yin (Adam Cheng) is looking for a man named Wah (or Fa, in any case played by Feng Tien) who is supposed to be the greatest swordsman of the age. Li Mak-Yin has the ambition to claim that title for himself. Finding Wah isn't easy, though, because the man has retired and hides away from the masses of minor swordsmen that want to fight him to prove their worth.

After searching for ten years, Li Mak-Yin finally finds the older swordsman's trail. A trader in information sells him a map to Wah's supposed home. Unfortunately it turns out to be lying in ruin. Only another searcher for Wah dwells there. He is quite mad and attacks Li Mak-Yin, whom he thinks to be Wah. After a short but intense fight, the mad man's head flies into the sunset. Our designated hero decides to rest in the empty ruins.

In the middle of the night a young woman (Jade Hsu) suddenly jumps through his window and into his bed. As this is something that happens to wuxia heroes regularly, his reaction is quite blasé. So blasé as to irritate the young lady enough to jump annoyed out of the room. She prefers dealing with the guy she's trying to escape from to the sudden smell of male smugness her would-be rescuer exudes. My, my, is she falling in love with him?

Li can't let the whole affair just jump away and follows the fleeing girl and her enemy, until he finally wounds the man and drives him away.

Alas, the woman does not show much gratitude and storms away. As luck will have it (a phrase you'll hear quite a bit in the following), both seem to be heading in the same direction and soon a heavy rainfall forces them to seek shelter in the same place. After a few shenanigans with food and drink, the two befriend each other and decide to make their way to the next town together.

When they come upon an inn, Li suddenly starts to act very distant. As luck will have it, a woman who arrives at the exact same moment as the two is Yin Siu-Hyu (Qiqi Chen), the love of his youth whom he left to pursue the elusive Wah.

Their meeting is full of repressed emotions and dutiful recognition of their social responsibilities. Nonetheless another window jumper suddenly attacks Li only to be called back by Yin Siu-Hyu's arriving husband Lin Wan (Norman Chu). He seems to be a nice enough fellow; a little too fearful for his wife's security perhaps. Li finds the situation kind of awkward anyway and excuses himself as fast as possible only to find that his other girlfriend has run off in a fit of jealousy.

While he follows her, we learn that Lin Wan isn't as nice as we thought. When his wife defends Li a little too eagerly for his taste, he hits her. As luck will have it, Lin Wan is also looking for Wah and does not like competition. So he sends his main henchman out to kill Li, while he himself takes care of the information trader.

Being a designated hero, Li is not that easy to kill. The fight ends inconclusive, with Li seriously hurt.

Fortunately a woman named Yeun Kai (Chau Wa Ngai) finds him and tends to his wounds. When he is well again, his rescuer receives a letter concerning an old friend of hers, a master swordsman whose enemies have kidnapped his daughter to press him into dueling them. Yeun Kai asks Li to rescue said daughter, something he does gladly when he reads that her father's name is (as luck will have it) Wah. His host even gives him a sword Wan once gave to her, although without knowing that it is an evil sword that will bring only suffering to the one who wields it (and obviously the ones hit by it).

Li is able to rescue Wah's daughter. She is, as luck will have it, the same girl he befriended before. She gladly takes him to her father who is very grateful for Li's deed. Grateful enough to grant the younger man his wish for a duel (which pisses off Ying-Chi royally).

Since we are still far from the end of the movie, Li wins the duel while wounding Wah only slightly.

Li is quite dissatisfied with the way things turned out. It's not as fulfilling to be the best than he always thought it would be. Well, he shouldn't fret, the film has a few more bad surprises for him, starting with Lin killing the recuperating Wah by deepening the wound he already received from Lin, so that Ying-Chi swears vengeance on Li while Lin steals what he really wanted - not fame for the killing of Wah, but the man's  sword; and, now that he really thinks about it, Li's sword would be nice, too.

How will Li escape these cunning plans? How many of the three women will survive the final reel? Will there be more destined twists of fate?

As you can see, The Sword's plot is quite complicated even for a wuxia and relies even more heavily on luck  than many masalas. That's not a big problem when one is able to accept the concept of fate or destiny as the base of the film's intellectual and especially moral world, as one just accepts faster than light travel in a space opera.

More problematic is that the film feels like a very uneasy marriage of different styles that director Patrick Tam can't fuse well enough to form a film that's a complete artistic success. Firstly we have a stiffened variation of classic wuxia melodrama that's just a little bit more slow-going than those elements usually are - unfortunately this "little bit" is the important bit that drags the film down and makes it feel a lot longer than the lean 85 minutes it really is.

Secondly we have a few moments of much more real (in an art house sense) human emotions, two of them bound to short bursts of violence that aren't as bloody but much more shocking than a decapitation. In themselves, these are highly successful scenes, but they don't fit into the same world as the action sequences or the melodrama.

Thirdly there is a handful of great to brilliant action scenes directed by Ching Siu-Tung, that are - except for the final fight - not as over the top as some of his later directorial works, but are reason enough to slog even through the most dishonest of melodramatic scenes. The use of the color red in the last few scenes is especially striking and in a few minutes does a lot more to connect the melodrama to the fighting than the rest of the film did in an hour.

A reason for the strange schizophrenia The Sword shows could be the awkward historical place it takes. In 1980, the traditional swordplay film was more or less dead (if you ignore the works of Chor Yuen, who either didn't or wouldn't care), first replaced by the kung fu film, then by the new wave of kung fu; it would take a few years more until people like Ching Siu-Tung and Tsui Hark would renew the genre (in a way unthinkable without the films of Chor Yuen, but that's really another story). I take films like this or Hark's artistically more successful Butterfly Murders as first steps on the way to the new wuxia. Unfortunately, first steps aren't always satisfying.

Further complicating the matter is the future career path of Patrick Tam which soon lead him to much more art house oriented films that agreed a lot more with his sensibilities.

All in all, The Sword isn't the kind of film I'd recommend to people who haven't watched a lot of wuxia movies, but for those of us who have, it's an interesting object of study with the added bonus of a handful of brilliant scenes.

Current Mood: calm

08:09 pm - In short: Golden Swallow (1987)

The penniless, wimpy but kind-hearted scholar Lo Chih-Chiuh (Anthony Wong Yiu-Ming - not a born actor) stumbles through life like all young scholars in this kind of movie do. He stumbles into a place known as the Black Mountains where he meets two slightly nuts taoist swordsmen/monks (Eric Tsang & Richard Ng) who haven't much useful to contribute to world peace besides bickering with each other and fighting inconclusive duels. He befriends them, more or less with their swords on his throat.

The dubious duo proves useful when bandits attack the travelers. The taoists are a little overzealous, and let Lo Chih-Chiuh find (or in his case: not find) his way around alone while they chase the surviving bandits.

Of course the scholar soon finds himself under attack from some of said bandits. Fortunately, a friendly girl demon (Cherie Chung - not a born actor either, whatever her millions of fans may say) rescues him, and even protects him from her mistress (Ivy Ling Po). This can only end one way. The two fall madly in love and even the returning taoists cannot convince the the scholar to leave well enough alone. Not even when they try to kill his new girlfriend does he listen!

Together the young lovers flee to Cherie's demon lair and have a few days and nights of musical montage love. The chief demoness learns all too soon of the affair, but shows herself merciful. If the lovers part and Lo Chih-Chiuh swears on his life never to divulge anything of his adventures to anyone, no one has to die. The lovers can't do much else and agree (whatever became of a romantic lovers' death together?).

In the not so far future the scholar will meet "another" woman whom he will marry and even have a child with. What happens next will surprise only the slowest of us...

After it has finished riffing on A Chinese Ghost Story, Golden Swallow comes into its own as a not very spectacular but nice and enjoyable wuxia. Our leads aren't strong actors, but make a likeable enough pair. Their stiffness would be a lot more troublesome in a modern setting, in Olde Fantasy China such stiffness is something I have come to expect from star-crossed lovers.

Direction, comic relief and so on are all solid, if unremarkable, leading to a film that should make for an enjoyable time if you like mid-80s wuxia (as I of course, do). Novices to the genre should probably go with one of the classics of the genre.