The Cameraman's Revenge

After Harakiri I was in the mood for something a bit less heavy. Solution: dive back into the DVD library for some Hong Kong action, and a particularly wild example of same (also one not to be confused with Tsui Hark’s own remake from 2001). Ropey though some of the effects might… well, do look in this day and age, they were state of the art in 1983 and groundbreaking for a film industry not used to them. Tsui imported American technicians to show the Hong Kong crowd what to do, and the result was an extravaganza that’s still kind of staggering, especially in its self-evident and unswerving commitment to Doing All The Things. So determined is it to be a mind-melting explosion of sheer Stuff Happening that it almost succeeds in making you realise the actual plot doesn’t really kick in until over half an hour in; up to that point it’s a long introduction to our main characters, a pair of somewhat odd couples (a Buddhist monk and his disciple; a travelling scholar and a soldier escaping a battle who becomes his disciple). That plot is kind of a thin one; they have to destroy the Blood Demon before it reincarnates, said mission involving a quest to recover two magic swords. Complications ensue when the scholar becomes the embodiment of evil along the way. The simplicity of the good-vs-evil conflict is nice, and the “Chineseness” of some of the details (cf. Sammo Hung’s monstrous holy eyebrows) gives it an obvious flavour, but really it’s about pure spectacle; it’s a film that shouts at you to look at it, see the tricks it can do, marvel at the amount of business it crams into just over 90 minutes, and try not to worry too much about the abruptness of some of the storytelling. At times like this, that sort of thing is just about perfect.

The plan to spend January doing rewatches of old stuff hasn’t really worked out, has it? Other project getting in the way and all that. Still, couldn’t let the month go without this one… alas, my delight at finding it on DVD (I got the recent Dragon Dynasty edition) has been tempered somewhat by the rather mediocre quality of the visuals, interlaced to buggery (apparently a PAL>NTSC conversion to boot) and looking worst of all during the big action scenes (after all these years, Weinstein still fucks up Asian cinema). And the big action really is what this is all about, even if it’s not quite as hyperactive as I recall it being. Indeed, it’s about 15 years now since I first saw (almost to the very day, I think), and what struck me most about it was how, well, “80s” it is. Something about it shouts “1989!” a little more loudly than it did when I first saw it, but then again 1997 was a lot closer to when the film was made than it is to 2012, it wouldn’t have looked so of its time back then perhaps… Still great, of course, still mighty stuff that I’m sure continues to define John Woo; though a comparative flop at home, it exploded him into the attention of western filmgoers and indeed into the Hollywood film industry, where he’s never really succeeded in matching his HK output, probably because for the most part (Face/Off being the notable exception) he hasn’t been able to go over the top as he does here. The gunfire is big, but the emotions are bigger; nobility, honour, all of that stuff, men on either side of the law forming friendship as they both find themselves adrift in a world that no longer respects the old values like they do. (On which note, isn’t it great to watch this knowing there’s not a frame of CGI in it?) I don’t know if I’d still call it the best action movie ever made, I’m no longer keen on such absolute statements, but any competitor would have to go really fucking hard to beat it for the title.

I couldn’t not watch the second film after that, though it was nearly 2.30am when it finished so far too late to start writing about it then. Anyway, this was the film that opened up the wonderful world of Hong Kong cinema to me 15 years ago… prior to which I’d just assumed films like this were needlessly violent southeast Asian trash; I can’t recall for the life of me why I finally decided to give this a go when SBS were showing it one night, but I did, and it demonstrated that, well, needlessly violent southeast Asian trash could be awfully entertaining. Here, Jackie is promoted to superintendent of a police station; this time he’s not only up against pirates (the handful of bedraggled survivors from the first film), but mainland revolutionaries, Chinese government spies, and corruption within the police force, particularly embodied by his own superior officer. The 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book includes this rather than the original on the grounds that it’s much the same as the first only there’s more of it (cf. also the first two Coffin Joe films for another illustration of this principle); I can see what they’re driving at though I don’t think I agree with the wisdom that this is the better film, I think both of them are pretty much equal. Watching this right after the original, I did kind of feel Sammo’s absence (he’s only here in the pre-credits recap of the action scenes from the first film), but then again there’s enough narrative elements and characters for Jackie to be getting on with as it is without him being in there too. But, obviously, what we look for here is the action, and the film surely delivers there, particularly the lengthy climactic showdown (this time Chan has the audacity to rip off Keaton). As an easy entry into Hong Kong action films, these are hard to beat.

Every now and then I find myself at a loose end, with literally hundreds of DVDs I could watch, but no idea what to watch. When such a mood hits me, as it did tonight, the answer is usually something both familiar and unthreatening, something I know is good that won’t tax me unduly… and while going through a box of stuff, I chanced upon the two Project A films. Jackie Chan classic? Why the hell not. I can’t remember when I last watched either of these, indeed I’m not sure I’ve actually watched either on DVD though I’ve had the discs for a number of years (bought them as library titles)… Anyway, this was a delightful rediscovery, one of the few Hong Kong period action films actually set in Hong Kong itself; it’s about 1900 or so, Chan is the coast guard sergeant co-opted with the rest of his squad into the hated police force, and pirates are running rampant. Chan quits the force after a bust that doesn’t quite go as it should, and finds himself teaming up with “good thief” Sammo Hung against the pirates and their associates on land. I hold to the theory that people are a mix of higher and lower aesthetic needs, and accordingly it’s hard to survive just on a diet of high art and seriousness; some times you need that, but other times your baser desires call louder than your higher ones and you just want to see shit getting broken in the course of three clearly defined acts. A film like this is perfect for that, riding on the winning charisma of Messrs Hung and Chan (the latter with enough balls to not only rip off Harold Lloyd’s clock-face bit but to include three different takes of it in the film), not to mention the vigour and athleticism of the rest of the cast too, and casually redefining the Hong Kong action comedy as it goes. On nights like this it’s exactly the sort of thing I need, even if I don’t realise it until I’ve looked over all my shelves and stuff…

It’s an atypical Hong Kong action film that puts you in mind of Dario Argento’s Inferno more than anything else, if only in terms of its use of lighting and colour (something about the blues and yellows), but then this really isn’t quite a typical HK actioner. Bey Logan’s book characterises it as an “arthouse kung fu movie”, which is one way of looking at it, I suppose. Our “hero” is a young man whose primary talent is drawing what I presume passed for manga in the 1920s, when the film is set; he gets kicked out of school for basically not doing anything else, and also for bringing trouble upon himself when he rescues a young girl—sold into slavery when she was little—from being swallowed up by a prostitution ring being run by the local police chief. They take refuge at a noodle restaurant run by Lau Kar-Leung’s kung fu master in seclusion Master Yat, who gives them a place to live as long as Yuk-Su works in the kitchen. Which he agrees to do, but he’s also prone to buggering off and learning kung fu elsewhere; when the time comes, though, he’s going to need the old man’s help to fend off even more trouble. Logan’s commentary notes that it was a notorious flop upon its eventual release nearly a year after shooting wrapped, and I can kind of understand why; I can see that director David Lai was trying to do something a bit different, particularly with the extraordinary look of the thing (if I didn’t know it was meant to be that dark, I’d have thought the DVD transfer had been severely fucked up), but I’m not sure how successful it actually is, and I fear part of that is down to Chin Kar Lok in the lead role; Yuk Su isn’t actually that interesting a character and he doesn’t seem that interesting a lead actor. A nice experiment, but I’m not sure it’s much more…

It’s not the most elegant film title (though a literal rendering of the Cantonese original) but it’s a lot better than Nutty Kickbox Cops, which IMDB claims was another title for it (Bey Logan’s commentary further claims that was the title. a German distributor gave it). Sammo pairs up with Karl Maka as the titular dragon and tiger, two of the Hong Kong police force’s finest (?), a duo somewhat lacking in the professionalism stakes who are busy trying to take down a triad gang (headed by Lau Kar Wing, the film’s director) while being sued for sexual harassment by a gangster’s girl they inadvertently hassle during a drug bust that goes marvellously wrong when they can’t tell her, a real woman, apart from a ladyboy. (And there’ll be more ladyboys to test them later on.) Apparently it wasn’t a huge box office hit, Lau hasn’t directed since then and Maka only made a handful of acting appearances thereafter; bit of a shame, cos it’s far from a masterpiece but it’s not awful either. Basically, it’s a late 80s buddy cop movie (taking quite a few cues from Peter Hyams’ Running Scared in particular), and in this case the buddy cops are an interesting match, Maka as the slapheaded broadly comedic middle-aged lech and Sammo as the younger and obviously larger half of the team with a neat line in Bruce Lee imitation. They keep the film engaging during its undeniable flat spots (most notably the whole Singapore business, which comes in for a fair bit of criticism and which Logan reckons should’ve been cut from the film entirely), and though the film does sag somewhat in the middle it starts and ends fairly well. Not a classic but for $10 it was an adequate entertainment.

So the motor vehicles and clothes mostly suggest a period setting of about the late 1920s or so. The hairstyles, at least some of them, suggest mid-80s. The presence of a small child called Wong Fei-Hung—yes, that one—suggests… well… mid-1850s. I gave up trying to untangle the film’s somewhat confused period around the same time I gave up trying to work out all who was who in the film—apparently it was made as a new year special event (released January 1 1986) and pretty much all of Golden Harvest’s stable of actors except that Chan fellow are in it somewhere —and then gave up trying to watch it at all without help from Bey Logan. The latter says in his commentary that he tried to get a British distributor to put the film out in the UK, but they couldn’t get past the fucking weird opening reel, and I can sympathise with that, to be honest… his suggestion that the film works on the same sort of level as a Warners cartoon (cf. the amount of  undercranking to produce unusually fast motion on screen in the manner of silent comedy) does offer a certain way into the film, which I’d otherwise been finding kind of baffling in terms of what it was trying to actually be. He also says something about the crew being quite high on pot during parts of the shooting, which might explain some things… Plot (if that’s the word) revolves around a train from Shanghai bearing three Japanese passengers targeted by a gang of bandits, train gets derailed by Sammo to bring business into his rundown village, whose police force have literally robbed the place blind, Sammo’s being pursued by a bounty hunter, fighting ensues. Thanks to Logan I can at least kind of appreciate what Hung was trying to achieve here, which. unfortunately, is not the same as actually liking it; character bloat and lack of focus undermine what I’m sure could’ve been quite good but, alas, didn’t work for me except in bits here and there.

Credited to Yuen Woo-Ping, although some sources ascribe Sammo Hung a co-director credit as well as the starring role. A film very much of two tonal halves, with the first half being home to some occasionally bizarre comedy (e.g. the shudder-inducing toilet joke involving the directionally confused blind man) before a fairly abrupt shift into darker territory in the second. Story-wise, it’s kind of an appendix to the original Wong Fei-Hung film series starring Kwan Tak-Hing; in his mid-70s by the time this film was made, he turns in an amazing calligraphy duel early in the film that I suspect some performers a third of his age would give anything to be able to pull off. But this isn’t a film about Master Wong, who goes off on a trip early on and leaves his clinic in the hands of three of his students, including Butcher Wing. The latter has brought the wrath of Master Ko and his clan upon himself, and Ko’s son will only insist upon complicating matters as both Wing’s younger brother and Master Wong’s old associate roll into town; there’s going to be trouble involving all of them, and the younger Ko is determined to make Wing take the blame. The shift in tone between the two parts is problematic, though not enough to really be seriously damaging, and on the whole it’s an above-average example of the late 70s kung fu actioner; Hung is great in the lead, playing the sort of well-intentioned if not always terribly bright character he’d give us in films like Encounters of the Spooky Kind and The Dead and the Deadly, but arguably the true star of the show is the makeup-aged Fan Mei-Sheng as the uproarious pisshead Beggar So. And for what it may be worth, this also marks the third film in a row I’ve seen with Lee Hoi Sang, plus the second in two days with Hark-On Fung, who I appear to have seen in several films without ever knowing who he was…

When I was stocking up on those cheap Hong Kong Legends titles last year, this was one I took a pretty random punt on. Didn’t recognise the title, didn’t really know anything about it (the Bey Logan book doesn’t have much to say about it), but I saw Sammo Hung credited as director and actor, came to the conclusion that it could not therefore be entirely bad and so added it to the stack. This was wise of me. Don’t know about the Hong Kong title, but the English one serves as a concise but accurate indicator of what you’re in for once you press play: lots of people and things—but mostly people—getting knocked about. Yuen Biao stars as one of two brothers who’ve grown up into con artists and decide they need to learn better kung fu than what they already know; accordingly they appoint themselves as students to Lau Kar Wing’s enigmatic old man with a shady past, and he teaches them good but they’ll have to discover the secret he’s hiding from them, whereupon even better skills are going to prove necessary. The fights in this film make for literally bruising encounters, to an extent I’m not sure I’ve quite seen before in a film like this, and the film is also host to possibly the strangest fight I’ve ever seen even in a Hong Kong film, the one where the brothers take on Lee Hoi Sang in the forest and literally give him lumps, great big ones like something out of a cartoon. But where the humour in Last Hurrah for Chivalry just seemed odd, here it’s part of the whole brew from which Sammo fashions a neat mix of comedy and kicking arse, understandably reserving a fair portion of same for himself; the physicality on display in the best films of this kind is always amazing to watch, especially when it’s Hung’s deceptive physicality we’re witnessing. Much fun.

This was a much better expenditure of $10 than Venoms was of $25, I will say. Hitherto my knowledge of John Y.S. Woo’s wu xia period was limited to Hand of Death, now I can add this to the tally. And, more so I think than Hand, this one seems to point the way forward to what he’d be doing a decade later; you could take this story set in feudal times and update it without an awful lot of trouble to an 80s Triad film. On the surface, an ostensibly simple revenge narrative: young man, scion of the presumably big Ko family, is about to get married. His wedding night, however, is spoiled by the rival Pak family gatecrashing and massacring everyone in the name of taking back what used to be their property in the first place. Revenge would seem eminently justified. Mind you, the apparent simplicity of the plot is undermined almost right from the start when the bride strikes the first blow against her impending husband, having been paid by Pak to do the dirty. That’s actually a kind of stunning moment, and there’s one or two other things said partly in passing even before the attack that I should’ve paid more attention to, cos they do kind of indicate a not unimportant later plot development (which also clears up a somewhat lengthy earlier scene whose import takes a while to become obvious), after young Ko involves a couple of itinerant swordsmen who take on the task of exacting vengeance. Woo does have a bit of a tonal problem with the film, there’s a fair bit of that trademark epic emotion, but there’s also an occasionally weird undercurrent of humour (particularly in the form of the “Sleeping Buddha”, who seems more like a character from a Jackie Chan film) that’s a bit off-putting and didn’t really work for me. The rest of the film, though, was perfectly fine, standing worthy comparison to his best 80s/early 90s HK films.