I know I’ve commented before on how striking I find it that Bruce Lee didn’t have much of an impact on Hong Kong martial films. After his short career it seems like Shaw Brothers went on doing what they had been doing since the 1960s, and everyone else began to concentrate on comedy and fantasy. What I’ve realized is that perhaps the problem is I’ve been focusing too much on good movies. Bruce Lee had a large influence on bad movies.

Take Black Dragon. Please.

Okay, it’s not really that bad. The plot is mostly a rip-off of The Big Boss (1971). Tai Yu (Jason Pai Piao) is a country bumpkin who is as strong as an ox. Tai’s brother has found success in the Phillipines, so Tai borrows money and makes his way to the islands to find his fortune. There Tai becomes a dock worker, though his fighting skills soon get him a job as an enforcer for the dock boss. There is a gang opposed to the dock boss, and at first Tai fights them, but later he realizes his boss is smuggling dope, so he joins the gang. The boss hires an international collection of martial artists to protect his interests, and much kicking results.

The fights scenes are okay, and in the style of Bruce Lee. The movie suffers from a distinct lack of star power. In the U.S. the movie was marketed as “Black Dragon” instead of the original English title “Tough Guy” on the strength of Ron Van Clief being in it. Van Clief was a sort of low rent alternative to Jim Kelly, with much better martial arts skills but a less resplendent afro. Van Clief is not anywhere near a main character in Black Dragon, but I’m sure the Blaxploitation angle helped promote the movie enough to be profitable. A year later one of the myriad movies about Bruce Lee’s death, also featuring Van Clief, would be released stateside as The Black Dragon Returns.

I’m not really motivated to watch a real kung fu movie right now, so I’ll go with Vampires: The Turning. It’s set in Thailand, and features a fair amount of muay thai, and some kung fu at the end.

Connor (Colin Egglesfield) and Amanda are an American couple vacationing in Thailand. They have a fight, and Amanda stalks off. She’s kidnapped by Niran (Dom Hetrakul), a vampire who leads a biker gang. Connor sees Amanda being driven off, but is stopped from chasing her by another vampire. He fights back, but his Muay Thai skills are no match for the undead. He’s saved by Kiko (Roger Yuan), who walks around the streets of whichever Thai city this is carrying a big sword.

Later Connor follows Kiko back to his headquarters, where he finds out that Kiko is a member of a good vampire gang. This gang is headed by Sang (Stephanie Chao), who 800 years ago started the “curse” by biting Niran in a fit of righteous curse. Now she wants to expose herself to sunlight at the end of an eclipse to end the curse, and she’s made an alliance with a group of vampire slayers to help her. (These slayers are the one connection the movie has to John Carpenter’s Vampires, to which this is a putative sequel.)

This movie was shot in the most boring parts of Thailand. I’ve seen some interesting movies shot in Thailand recently, but there were times I thought this might have been shot in California. Only humorous misspellings on the English signs dissuaded me. (“Sighteeing,” for example.) The only really unique element is the idea that Sang can end “the curse,” but I’m not sure what the curse was. They say she was a vampire that didn’t drink human blood, then she turned Niran during an eclipse, and he and his spawn bit a bunch of other people. Okay, so? Some of those people who turned were bad, but some of them seemed to be good too. Kiko, for example. Where is the curse that started with the eclipse? I really didn’t get that.

Something a little different this week, a Vietnamese martial arts movie. Set in 1922 during the French colonial period, The Rebel is the story of Cuong (Johnny Tri Nguyen), an agent for the secret police of the colonial government, who falls in love with the daughter of a resistance leader and comes to see the injustice of French Rule.

Nothing terribly surprising, storywise. Cuong ends up on the injustice tour, just happening to end up in a labor camp, hearing stories about how the French rape and kill civilians, etc. He even gets to lead a mini-uprising. The film’s main antagonist is Sy (Dustin Nguyen), Cuong’s former colleague in the secret police, and highly motivated to capture rebels because he wants a high post in the government. I was surprised that while the movie doesn’t skimp on showing colonial atrocities there is dialogue to the effect that not all French people are bad and they did build roads and schools. And aqueducts, I guess.

For a movie that was made for almost nothing, The Rebel looks good. There is a certain gritty, color-leeched quality to the whole thing that really drives home the oppression the citizens are living under. The fight scene are proficient, and obviously inspired by Ong Bak and some of the other recent Thai films. The fights don’t include any of the incredible acrobatics of a Tony Jaa film, but the acting is a hell of lot better. My only real complaint is that for some reason Sy appears to have a mystical immunity to knives. It’s an odd thing, in a movie that’s otherwise fairly realistic.

Royal Tramp II was released the same year as Royal Tramp, and I assume filmed at the same time, judging from the extensive reuse of sets. At least to this non-Chinese speaker, Royal Tramp II was the far more enjoyable movie, mainly because the humor is much more physical and situational rather than verbal.

The sequel picks up with Wei Su Bo (Stephen Chow) as an important government figure. The Fake Empress Dowager from the previous film enters the “blood pool” with her elderly master and emerges as Lone-er, a gestalt being played by Brigette Lin. Lone-er disguises herself as a man and enters into conspiracy that involves marriages and plots and assassinations, all aimed at over throwing the Ching (or is it Ming?) emperor. Look, I couldn’t really follow it, especially since the subtitles aren’t consistent with the names of people or groups. The important thing is that Lone-er gets hit with a poison blow that will kill her unless she has sex. The only male nearby happens to be Wei Su Bo, and Bo absorbs 80% of her powers. I love how specific these things are in Chinese marital arts. With Bo now a martial arts master the bad guys bring in an evil martial arts master who can control his minions through strings attached to needles he throws into their necks! And the lost book from the first movie makes a sudden appearance more than hour into this movie, giving what has to be least helpful clue ever for finding a buried treasure.

There is much, much more wire fu this time around, and it’s a lot more intricate and fun as well. Stephen Chow’s most annoying schtick is confined to a few scenes in the middle of the film, and at the end he finally busts out some kung fu moves, though he’s not anywhere near the level of proficiency he would show in his most recent movies. Brigette Lin can class up any film, though having her mack on Chow is like watching love scenes between Angelina Jolie and Rob Schneider. Brrrrrr!

I decided to show this to Amy because the director Zhang Yimou also produced the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Hero certainly foreshadows last week’s extravaganza in terms of Zhang’s love of epic multitudes moving in unison.

Amy didn’t seem to like the movie as much as I do, but then, this is probably my favorite martial arts movie of all time. I love the cast (Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Donnie Yen), I love Chris Doyle’s cinematography, I love Tan Dun’s score, I love Ching Sui Tung’s fights. I could watch this movie on a loop.

Fencing!

Javelin!

Reverse archery!

Table tennis!

Yuen Woo Ping is a fantastic action director, but I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of his later work as solo director.

Take Tai Chi Master, for example. Without a doubt it features some of the best kung fu fights I’ve ever seen. In particular the duel between Michelle Yeoh (still credited as “Michelle Khan” in the oddly damaged print used for the new DVD) and the evil albino eunuch set the bar for superpowered fight scenes, at least until CGI made wire removal so easy.

But on the other hand, Woo Ping’s later movies tend to the infested with bizarrely inappropriate digressions. In Tai Chi Master I could have done without the dozen or so cutaways to the one alleged good guy who is trying to fake his own death during a desperate fight, or the oddity of one fight scene where Jet Li keeps (fatally) hitting people with his head, actually bouncing from one prostrate body to another on his noggin like some sort of demented Mario Brothers character.

When Woo Ping works with another director, I think his worst tendencies are curtailed. Also, working with people like Gordon Chan, Quentin Tarantino, and Wachowskis seems to have driven Woo Ping to new heights of realism in his wire-fu, and that’s a good thing.

Apparently Robert’s Rules of Order are different in China.

This is why you should always leave a tip.

Managements Techniques of the Beautiful and Kick-Ass.

“Don’t ruin this great cinematography by talking.”

Hunting pandas is lot harder that I thought.

“I promise I won’t be in Rush Hour 4, okay?”

The Chinese Olympics are going to be more exciting than past games.

Five Deadly Venoms is a movie so good there’s a whole subgenre named after it. Movies directed by Chang Cheh and starring the set of actors featured in this movie are called “Venom Mob” movies. Here’s what you need to keep in mind to enjoy a Venom Mob movie:

- Don’t worry about keeping track of every character at the beginning of the movie. It’s pointless. Most of these movies have setups that would make Victor Hugo throw up his hands in confusion. For example, Five Deadly Venoms opens with the dying Poison clan head explaining to his only student that the student has to redeems the evil that the Poison Clan has done, that there’s a secret treasure all his old students are looking for, and that the old students all have superpowers and wore masks and trained at various times and some of them know each other and some of them don’t… You really need a flow chart. And then the movie introduces a bunch of red herrings who may or may not be students.

Here’s the trick: Half of these character will be dead before the movie reaches the halfway point, and then the conflicts and relationships will be much clearer. Just stick with the movie until the slaughter begins, and you’ll have a much better time.

- Don’t expect many female characters. Despite the slightly defensive testimonials on some of the new Celestial DVDs to how not-gay Chang Cheh was, almost every one of the Venom Mob movies ends with two men walking off into the sunset, sometimes holding hands. The only females in Five Deadly Venoms are extras representing a family that gets completely wiped out by the bad guys.

“I’m ready for my match with El Santo!”

They’re just needling him.

I wish learning kung fu would actually let you do stuff like this.

After making Amy watch High Risk last week, I really though I owed her a good Jet Li movie, and there are few Jet Li movies better than Once Upon a Time in China.

“I’m Jet Li, bitch.”

“I’m Jet Li in the rain, bitch.”

“I’m Jet Li in a stupid hat, bitch.”

“I’m Jet Li with a pastry, bitch.”

“I’m Jet Li with my biggest fan, bitch.”

“I’d like to go over the checklist of things we’re going to need to steal the Czar’s jewels from the penthouse of the skyscraper.”

“Sure, boss.”

“How are we on personnel?”

“We got a 150 faceless and interchangeable thugs, but they’ve been carefully briefed to make sure no one will ever see more than 10 of them at a time. But if shooting starts they’ll all jump out of every corner and take a couple of bullets in the chest just for the heck of it. They won’t die hard.”

“Why did you say those last two words like that?”

“No reason.”

“Who else do we have?”

“We also have the computer expert, who will be the only person wearing glasses, and our main thug is obsessed with beating up a certain movie star. I’m sure that last one won’t be a liability.”

“Weapons?”

“We’ve got lots of machine guns, and those pistols with hexagonal cartridges on top. One guy is bringing his 7.62mm machinegun. A few machetes. Also, two flame throwers. Oh, and everyone has pistols.”

“Okay. Wait, what was that?”

“Everyone has pistols.”

“Before that. Did you say flame throwers?”

“Sure.”

“Do we need flame throwers? It’s a hotel! We aren’t going to be clearing brush or busting bunkers.”

“What if someone drives a car into the lobby elevator, rides it up the penthouse, and starts trying to run us over? Flame thrower might be useful then. At the very least when the car catches on fire it will look really cool going off the balcony and falling to the street.”

“You have a point. Anything else?”

“One more thing. The bill for the snakes came today, and they want us to pay before the job.”

“SNAKES? Why do we have snakes? Is Samuel L. Jackson going to be up there?”

“No, but one of our main thugs thought we might want to have a bag full of snakes. The guy at the store even threw in a free monitor lizard, so it seemed like a pretty good deal.”

“Okay, okay. The planning here has been a little rocky, but so long as the nothing really unlikely happens, like some special forces guy whose family I blew up a couple years ago happening to be in the building, I’m sure it will go fine.”

Jet Li is really into game shows.

“Oh, I’m get it. I’m supposed to be Jackie Chan!”

No matter what some fantasy-prone foot fetishist on Wikipedia thinks, this woman is wearing shoes.

The sophisticated comedy Wong Jing is known for.

My advice: Tip the bellhops.

Parking in the city is tough.

“These snakes are paying for themselves!”

“Now I’m Bruce Lee? I’m so confused!”

Jet Li promised High Risk would be his last Wong Jing film, but he lied about that too.

There are some movies where there is no question as to why they are considered classics. Fist of Fury, Bruce Lee’s most successful film in Asia, is one of those. The story may be simple (Bruce Lee plays a student avenging the death of his teacher, who was poisoned by Japanese martial artists), the second act sags (badly — the scenes where Bruce disguises himself and spies on the Japanese could easily be dropped), and sometimes Bruce’s philosophy of acting seems to be to provide quantity over quality (“Why did you kill my teacher?! Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?!”), but the fight scenes are fast, and fluid, complex and vicious, and Bruce Lee’s incredible charisma shines in every scene.

What’s strange is that though this movie was a huge hit and made Bruce Lee an icon, it had almost no effect on the HK martial arts film at all. After Bruce Lee died in 1973 open hand fighting became a bit more common in movies and there were couple of movies that followed Lee’s example (set in Way of the Dragon) and shot overseas, but in general Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest kept pumping out the exact kind of martial arts films they did before 1973. If anything, the next big movement in martial arts films was the “Five Venoms” type, which were actually less realistic and more mannered than earlier films, moving in exactly the opposite direction Bruce Lee seemed to want to go. It wasn’t until Jackie Chan making modern day martial arts film in the early 1980s that it seemed like someone had learned something from what Bruce Lee had been trying to do.

Maybe he works for an HMO.

A whole six pack of whup-ass is about to be opened.

“I love camping out.”

“Have you seen my cat? I’ve been looking everywhere!”

Though my girlfriend watched Master of the Flying Guillotine on Sunday, I didn’t get the chance. So rather than talk about the movie I haven’t seen in some years, I thought I’d discuss one of the more fun aspects of the movie. That is, of course, the handicapped fighters.

I think the idea of having… differently-abled martial artists started with the Japanese Zatoichi movies, which were about a blind swordsman. The idea was that he could hear well enough to find his enemies. The series was wildly successful in Japan and basically produced two movies a year from 1962 until 1974, with a TV series following from 1974 until 1979, and two revival movies in 1989 and 2003. The character was popular all over Asia, and you’ll see him referenced in Hong Kong movies.

In 1967 Shaw Brothers produced One-Armed Swordsman, a very popular movie about a, well, swordsman with only one arm. Jimmy Wang Yu played the character with his arm strapped behind his back, or sometimes a little too obviously stuffed inside the front of shirt if he needed to move around. The movie made Wang Yu a star, and for a few years he kept up the partially-armless schtick, first in a sequel to One-Armed Swordsman, and after he left Hong Kong in One Armed Boxer. In 1972 Wang Yu reprised the One-Armed Swordsman to fight the blind Zatoichi in Zatoichi Meets the One-Armed Swordsman, which seemed to inspire a trend of having fighters with various handicaps square off with each other for our amusement. Master of the Flying Guillotine features Wang Yu as the One Armed Boxer again, being hunted by a blind Imperial executioner who uses the titular (awesome) weapon.

Surely the high watermark of handicapped fighter movies is Crippled Avengers (1976), also known as Mortal Combat, Return of the Five Deadly Venoms, and Deathfist of the Special Olympics. Directed by Chang Cheh, the movie is about an embittered would-be kung fu master who can never excel at the art because his hands were chopped off when he was kid. He’s been fitted with robot hands, which seem to be more than fully functional, but he still feels the need to go around crippling other people to make himself feel better. Eventually a bunch of his victims, included a blind guy, a deaf guy, an lobotomized guy, and a legless guy, gang up and get vengeance, getting vengeance being the number one occupation in 18th century China. Please do not confuse this movie with the tasteless Crippled Masters (1979), which featured actors with birth defects.

The handicapped fighter thing never really caught on in the West, unless you include the comic book character Daredevil. (Daredevil’s first appearance is within a couple of years of Zatoichi, long before anyone in the states is likely to have seen the movies, so the similarities are probably coincidence. I’m guessing both characters were the result of the popular-but-erroneous meme that blind people’s other senses were heightened. I think that belief started in the 1960s.) Spaghetti Westerns had been mining samurai movies for material since A Fistful of Dollars (1964), so it isn’t surprising that someone tried a blind gunfighter in 1971′s Blindman. Zatoichi was given another try as white guy in 1989′s Blind Fury. Perhaps by way of the aforementioned Spaghetti Westerns, the seminal Bollywood film Sholay features a man with no arms seeking revenge on the bandits that mutilated him.

(And no, Crippled Avengers was not actually known as “Deathfist of the Special Olympics.” But it should have been.)

He’s either scared of the flying guillotine, or that fake beard.

It’s best not to ask what’s happening here.

That hardly seems fair.

So brave. He fights on despite having one arm, and apparently being six months pregnant.

Every Sunday I watch a kung fu movie with my girlfriend, so I’m figuring I’ll write them up for a new feature I call Kung Fu Tuesday.

Heroes of the East is one of the all-time classic kung fu flicks. Directed by Lau Kar-Leung and starring Gordon Liu, the movie is almost worth seeing just because it’s not the usual rigamarole about revenge. It’s about love. Sort of.

Ah To (Liu) is a young martial arts student forced by his father to marry Kung Zi, the daughter of the father’s Japanese business partner. Luckily for Ah To, Kung Zi is hot. Unluckily for Ah To, Kung Zi is fanatical about Japanese martial arts and has a bewilderingly casual attitude towards property destruction. Ah To tries to convince Kung Zi to give up the Japanese fighting techniques for the more demure Chinese martial arts. (Her loose fitting judo robes are distracting the help.) I’ll give Ah To points for having guts, because he’s talking back to a woman who has shown the ability, and even a willingness, to shove her bare foot through a brick wall.

To drive his point home, Ah To humiliates Kung Zi in a series of sparring matches and even takes away her weapons. That’s the final straw, and Kung Zi leaves Ah To and goes back to Japan. In what is probably a telling moment, Ah To’s father, in Japan, tells Kung Zi’s father that the situation is probably all his son’s fault and he’ll make the boy apologize. Instead, Ah To sends a letter to Kung Zi challenging her to a series of duels, apparently in the hope that when she loses she’ll see the error of her ways. The letter is intercepted by one of Kung Zi’s sensei, and eight Japanese martial arts masters travel to Hong Kong to teach Ah To a lesson. What follows is a non-stop series of incredibly varied martial arts duels, with the Japanese employing one system or weapon (kendo, karate, judo, sais, the nunchuck, the spear, and best of all, ninjitsu) and Ah To countering with the Chinese equivalent.

Easily the most unique feature of Heroes of the East is the portrayal of the Japanese. At this point in HK film history you’d have a tough time finding any movie that depicted Japanese characters as being anything less that bloodthirsty and horrible, and while this movie isn’t quite what I’d call balanced (Ah To wins all the matches handily, proving the Chinese martial arts superior), it is generally goodnatured towards the Japanese characters.

The movie does have some odd structural quirks, probably caused by the studio heads interfering in the production. One of the Shaw brothers (Runme? I always forget) was infamous for doing that, and that’s why, for example, Come Drink With Me (1968) ends with the main female character disappearing and the two old guys shooting compressed air at each other. Something similar happens in Heroes of the East. About the first half of the film is a funny comedy about Ah To’s relationship with Kung Zi and how she won’t go back to him. Then, suddenly, after Ah To’s first duel with a Japanese master, Kung Zi switches to Ah To’s side and the movie becomes more of a drama about how Ah To and the Japanese masters are letting their stubbornness get in the way of good sense. By the last twenty minutes Kung Zi disappears completely from the narrative, apparently forgotten by all the male characters. There’s also a gratuitous Beggar So sequence, I’m guessing shoehorned in because of the popularity of Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master the year before.

Ah To and Kung Zi discuss whether Japanese or Chinese martial arts are better…

Japanese martial arts. Japanese martial arts are clearly better.

I wonder how Bruce Lee would feel about being portrayed as a Japanese guy?

Get a room, guys.

Ah, the secret Hidden Knitting Needle style.