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.

I took a complete random punt on this when I spotted it at my local JB Hi-Fi, I was looking around the Eastern Eye section one day a few months ago and spotted this Dragon Dynasty release there. I didn’t recognise the title, but I spotted Lau Kar-Leung’s name on the box art and decided it had to be worth a try. Closer inspection of IMDB revealed the film is actually better known as Shaolin Challenges Ninja, and Bey Logan’s book regards it highly under that name, so I felt I’d made a fair pick, and on viewing tonight at last I think I was indeed right. Gordon Liu is present (and bewigged—I had a feeling that couldn’t be his real head of hair, and Logan’s commentary confirmed as much) and correct as Ho Tao, the son of a Chinese businessman married off for business reasons to a Japanese girl, who proves—to his less than unmitigated delight—to be something of a destructive tigress when it comes to martial arts, leading to a string of disputes about the merits of Chinese vs Japanese martial arts and culture in general; when she takes herself back to Japan and he sends her a challenge letter, a group of Japanese fighters—including her ninjitsu master former lover—accept it to defend her honour. And the complications don’t quite stop ensuing there. It’s a romantic comedy of a somewhat twisted sort, there’s plenty of such films built around the happy couple squabbling but I can’t think of any other involving a team of martial artists like this… and needless to say there’s no prizes for guessing who will prevail in a Chinese film about a clash between Chinese and Japanese fighters, but Lau was determined to depict all combatants with respect rather than making the Japanese warriors the usual villainous stereotypes. Apart from being great entertainment it must’ve done more good for Sino-Japanese relations than Hapkido, for example…

Somehow, even before Jackie Chan appears on screen, you just know you’re in better hands than you were with the last three early works of his that we saw… possibly because we’re now in his hands. Lo Wei had loaned him out to Seasonal Films where Jackie finally had his first big hits with Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master; Chan now went back to Lo to fulfil his contract and repeat the kung fu comedy experiment with himself in the director’s seat for the first time. Finally he had a hit for Lo Wei as well, and with some good reason; by this time Chan was clearly far more certain of what worked for him than Lo ever was. We’ve seen this plot before, where powerful evil agents for the Qing government are hunting down and killing their opponents, one of whom happens to be Jackie’s grandfather, and it’s through Jackie—no match for the old man but skilled enough to take on most other comers and thereby inadvertently attract unwanted attention—that General Yen finds him, setting the stage for a grand vengeful battle. It all works nicely right from the start, the fights (including a terrific one with Jackie in drag) are better, the humour feels much more deliberate, the sound effects are exaggerated even by Hong Kong standards, it makes better use of Chan’s physicality and agility, and it just feels like more of a “Jackie Chan film”; he even looks more like “Jackie Chan”. And, as I said, he finally had a hit to end his contract with Lo Wei, who he got the hell away from as soon as he could thereafter; it feels like a reward for the viewer, too, with Chan’s star quality finally becoming fully apparent after being mostly hidden under a bushel in the last three films we’ve considered.

There comes a time when you watch a film and it does something so audacious you can only marvel at the no-fucks-given attitude required to pull it off. In this case, it’s the jaw-droppingly blatant manner in which Lo Wei simply lifts bleeding, not to mention bleedingly obvious, chunks of the score to a film released the previous year called Star Wars (you may have heard of it) to soundtrack parts of his own tale about a young man pressed into helping a young woman in a dangerous situation… I know the Hong Kong was hardly a haven of copyright observance, but the total disregard for the fact that people might notice you’ve just pirated part of one of the most successful films of that year is kind of belief-beggaring. To a lesser extent, the rest of the film is a bit like that too… Jackie Chan is a warrior with mighty fists, an astonishing period wig and ludicrous sideburns, and if I hadn’t known he was in it I’d barely have guessed that was him; he’s hired (along with a deaf leather-worker and a swordsman with a fondness for skinning his opponents) to help protect a young woman transporting her ill brother through a dangerous region, except that things on that front aren’t entirely what they seem. It was filmed in 3D, leading to lots of gratuitous shots of things being thrust at the audience, and in a good 3D print it’d be kind of fun; alas, this is a flat print in piss-poor quality (apparently HKL’s “Ultrabit” discs weren’t always what they claimed to be, and I had to keep fiddling with the brightness and contrast to get a decent picture), which did detract. It might also have been better had the film been made by a more capable director than Lo Wei seems to have been, and had Jackie been more prominent in the mix; again I got the feeling that the focus on the supposed star was weak. It’s not bad, but should’ve been better. Fortunately for Jackie, better things were just around the corner…

This is a bit more like it, although I’m not sure exactly who to credit; Lo Wei is listed on the print as director but Chen Chi-Hwa is “executive director”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. IMDB and Wiki ascribe Chen (who I gather is not the same as Jeong Chang-Hwa who made King Boxer) the directorial credit, for whatever that may be worth. Or should we credit young J. Chan, who was action director as well as star on this film? At any rate the action is somewhat more plentiful, though once again the story is hampered somewhat by its structuring (which leaves possibly the most important driving aspect of the plot unexplained until almost the very end)… this time round Jackie is a young mute man studying at Shaolin Temple, apparently neither the best nor brightest of the bunch, who one day ventures into a forbidden area of the temple and there finds a somewhat sinister figure chained up; this latter assists him with his kung fu training and speeds him through to the combat with the titular wooden men, which is the final test… but after graduation there’s the real world to face, and an even bigger test. Odd that the abbot doesn’t ask him exactly who he trained under until after he’s left, but never mind… At least Chan gets to evince more charisma here, more of a sense of what’d eventually make him great—though it’s not a comedy by any means he does at least have some comic business to perform—and the film’s focus on him is far stronger here, which is good given how much he carries it. The extraordinary opening dream-sequence duel shows more promise in six minutes than the whole of NFoF; and I fear I’m overrating it a bit, that maybe it’s not really quite as good as it looks by comparison with that film, but it is a definite improvement either way… if only I could work out who was responsible for it.

Conversely, this one is much more story than fight; after a couple of early skirmishes the first decent fight only comes near the halfway point… speaking of which, if the film’s Wiki entry is right then it appears Hong Kong Legends’ print is actually the shorter re-release version. Having said which, I’m not going to complain, cos another half-hour of not much happening would’ve been difficult to swallow. Lo Wei had even less idea of what to do with Jackie Chan than he did Bruce Lee, and it shows here; in his first real starring role (his first actual supposed lead having been a film that apparently went unreleased for years), he just doesn’t seem to have much to actually *do*. The film is a follow-on from the Bruce Lee film, with Chan playing a young thief who’s not interested in learning martial arts until he Can’t Stand No More and takes up arms with the Jing Wu school against the hated Japanese; just as well he proves to be a fast learner in the fighting arts. Unfortunately, the bizarre lack of focus on the performer who’s supposed to be the star of the thing vitiates the film’s effectiveness, along with the off pacing and structure and, well, the basic lack of action and spark. Graduating from bit parts like the one he played in Hapkido, and supports like Hand of Death (made before but released just after this), Chan makes surprisingly little impression, but it’s not like he gets much of a chance; early on he already knew what audiences would discover only years later, i.e. that his real forte was action comedy rather than straight kung fu. Alas, Lo Wei was slower than anyone to recognise this and, with audiences tiring of “Brucesploitation” and ignoring this in droves, Chan was stuck for years with a string of Lo-managed flops that could’ve stifled his career and prevented him ever reaching stardom at all. New Fist of Fury, in the end, offers a historical insight for Chan fans into just where he started out, but not an awful lot more.

Ah, that was a nice break from blogging (albeit not from watching stuff, I’ve been running a few Doctor Who binges in the last week). However! That backlog of unwatched DVDs isn’t getting any smaller and I’ve just added a raft of cheap Hong Kong Legends discs to the library (my local EzyDVD outlet has been selling them for $10, which is significantly less than they’re asking for the same discs online; a bargain I’ve been finding too hard to resist), so it’s time we started exploring those… we begin with an early Golden Harvest number (parenthetically, how amusing is it that GH’s logo at this time was a shield similar to Shaw’s, which was itself a knock-off of Warner’s?) which would appear to have been designed on the principle “bugger the plot, there’s arse to be kicked, and kicked hard”; three young students at the first Korean hapkido school (Angela Mao, Carter Wong, Sammo Hung) are assigned to start their own school in China, but this is 1934, when Korea is Japanese territory and China is feeling the Japanese pinch as well. More particularly, the local martial arts schools in Chang Zhou fear the Japanese-run Black Bear school, whose members lord it over the town and its people… until Sammo starts the fight on behalf of the residents. Narrative development in this film is pretty much in the nature of short bridges between fights, and the latter is what it’s really about; this came out about six months after Fist of Fury and it shares that film’s anti-Japanese sentiment, though whether it was a direct influence/knock-off or it just partakes of a still not-uncommon racial sentiment is something I don’t know. But it certainly fuels the fire behind the fighting here, and if the main appeal of a martial arts film for you is the sheer sight of people beating the shit out of each other rather than narrative niceties, Hapkido should do the turn for you. It’s got Sammo Hung in one of his early leads, and that can’t be a bad thing.

In 1976 John Woo had yet to become the king of heroic bloodshed; indeed he had yet to even become John Woo (the director credit here is “Wu Yu-Sheng”). In fact he nearly became the king of comedy before he moved into gangster films, but apparently that’s another story altogether. Here we have him still making conventional wu xia near the start of his career, along with later luminaries like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, none of whom were big enough at the time, apparently, to merit having their names listed in the credits in English. If I harp on about the names, it’s because they are, to some extent, the most interesting thing about the film, and probably what causes it to still be remembered and reissued these days. Narratively, Hand of Death is really just one of god/dess knows how many variations on the Shaolin Temple story, where they’ve been betrayed to Manchu agents and one of their heroes must take out the latter while also ensuring the safety of a travelling scholar who must send vital information through Manchu territory. I first saw this in my early days of exploring HK cinema, would’ve likely been around 1997, on a fairly shitty videotape; my second encounter with it last night on DVD was far more pleasant. I don’t think anyone would call it top drawer Woo, but it’s still enjoyable stuff—it may not be quite as action-packed as The Killer, but what is?—and while it’s not exactly ground-breaking it’s still a pretty good example of the genre; plus it’s nice to see a barely recognisable Chan and a villainous Sammo (whose teeth are probably the most evil thing about him here) in early roles. As for actual star Dorian Tan, I can only wonder why he never got as big as the other future big names here; he’s good but doesn’t seem to have that sort of iconic presence. Best of all, though, the “ultra-bit” DVD (the sort which skimps on extras to maximise the bitrate available for the film transfer) shows off gloriously the film’s Korean locations; decidedly unusual for the dominant colour in a John Woo film to be that astonishingly lush green rather than blood red, but so it is…

Thought it was high time I finally finished off the Zatoichi collection (and it’s a bit of a break from the noir stuff too; something in colour and widescreen again). This one doesn’t follow on as directly from its predecessor as the earlier films in the series did, but we do get the reintroduction of an earlier character who may well prove to be the masseur’s downfall. Meanwhile Ichi is still pissing people off, blatantly besting members of a yakuza clan in a public wrestling contest and earning a substantial price on his head for his efforts. In the interim, there’s territorial intrigue ahoy with the new young leader of one clan facing opposition from another, with the adopted daughter of the latter group’s leader being the object of the young man’s affections. And more besides. Indeed, there’s enough going on in the background that I must confess to having some difficulty following all the action… regarding which, the film culminates in what is regarded as one of the best battles of the whole series, and the film as a whole serves as a good way to round off this particular collection. Obviously the series continued long after this point, but the first four add up to a nice grouping by themselves.

And again we continue the story from the previous film, just in colour this time… anyway, I saw a documentary a couple of years ago called Blindsight about blind kids in Tibet and was interested to discover there’s a considerable cultural prejudice against blind people there, and apparently something similar is or was true of Japan as well. Knowing that gave this film a certain additional edge; obviously in the first two films you could see Zatoichi was tolerated by others only as long as he was useful to them, otherwise he just gets cursed out, but in this film he gets it from his own sensei… who’s kind of miffed, to say the least, at having tried to arrange a decent marriage for his sister only to have the latter decide she likes our blind friend better. All he wanted was to live a good life again and it looked like the love of a good woman was going to provide him with the drive to do so until sensei decided otherwise. Then again, with sensei mixed up in some bad business, perhaps the quiet life was going to be hard to achieve… and then there’s the brother of a character killed in the previous film out for revenge as well. I think I liked this on the whole more than I did the first two in the series.