DEVIL'S EXPRESS (Gang Wars, 1976)

First-time director Barry Rosen bet on a Seventies genre trifecta by making a blaxploitation martial-arts horror film, and while I wouldn't call it a good movie it is an often-fascinating document of the fantasy life springing from the grungy state of urban life at that time. In its Mummy-inspired prologue, ancient Chinese monks lower a mysterious casket, with an amulet attached, into a hole in the earth. To ensure that no one knows the location of the burial, the leader of the little group kills everyone else before putting himself to the sword. While he might well have waited until they'd all done something to cover the hole, no one actually discovers the mystery inside until centuries later.

In 1970s Harlem, martial-arts instructor Luke (Warhawk Tanzania) spars with his friend Cris (Larry Fleischman). It's a tense friendship since Luke is black and Cris is a white cop, but as Luke explains to his suspicious students, he owes Cris a favor. In any event, Luke and his student-buddy Rodan (Wilfredo Roldan) are soon off to Hong Kong for some elite training. Rodan's head really isn't into the discipline -- he's more of a thug at heart -- but Luke earns a diploma after a match with the master. After that, Luke is sent to an island to meditate, while Rodan is tasked with watching over him. Bored by it all, Rodan just happens to discover the pit that generations of random explorers and possible treasure hunters managed to miss. Lowering himself in with ease, he snatches the amulet and takes it home to America with him.

The Hong Kong-New York steamer has another passenger: a Chinese man who suddenly finds himself possessed by some unseen entity. By the time he reaches the U.S. he's a staggering, bug-eyed mess terrified by every bright light and sharp sound until he finds a sort of shelter in the subway system. Now whatever's inside him can come into its own, though the filmmakers don't quite have the money to do more than suggest a chest-bursting exit with a lot of bleeding.

Meanwhile, Rodan and his gang buddies escalate their feud with a Chinese gang after he gets ripped off in a cocaine deal. In a violent variation on West Side Story the Chinese and black/Hispanic gangs perform martial-arts rumbles in the slums of New York, where the producers enjoyed extensive municipal cooperation despite their film's unflattering snapshot of Seventies squalor. As the gang war escalates, Cris and the rest of the police begin investigating a subway serial killer. While his comedy-relief partner invokes urban legends of mutant animals, Cris suspects that the killings are gang-related, despite Luke's vehement pushback against that suggestion. Luke's attitude toward his friends is strangely ambivalent. He warns them constantly against using martial arts in anger, but it's unclear whether he even realizes that Rodan is a drug dealer or if he would care. He lives in a sort of ebony tower, content to make love to his girlfriend and improve his knowledge until the killings come to close to home.

As you might guess, the subway entity is drawn to Rodan for the amulet he wears -- but by the time it finally catches up with him, the Chinese gang has snatched it away. That's how their wise old mentor is finally able to explain the actual situation to Luke, once the Chinese convince him that they weren't the ones who slammed Rodan face-first into a transformer. Only Luke has the mental discipline to defeat the monster, which adds an arsenal of psychic attacks to its arsenal for the final showdown in the tunnels. It takes a variety of forms, including Rodan and later two fighters at once, before trying to convince Luke that trains are bearing down on him. For Rosen it's a brave effort at something trippy and supernatural, but when the monster finally shows its true form and goes for a death grapple the scene is too dark to appreciate either the monster get-up or the climactic action.

While Devil's Express ends on an underwhelming note, it's an admirable B-film in which everyone seems to be trying hard to make an impression. Warhawk Tanzania (who made only one more film) is no real actor but at least errs on the side of excess, and while the fighting isn't much by Chinese standards (and the gore effects are mostly laughable) Rosen and his co-writers manage to invest each encounter with some dramatic urgency. They also find time for gratuitously entertaining stuff like a fight between a male bully and a female bartender at Luke's favorite watering hole and a cameo by misanthropic performance artist Brother Theodore -- he may be remembered from the early years of David Letterman's late-night show -- as a priest slowly driven mad by the subway killings. There's a likable cacophany to the pre-climactic scene where Luke negotiates with the cops to let him go into the tunnels alone while the priest rants to the assembled crowd about dead gods, pestiferous rats and whatnot. Rosen's enthusiasm makes it regrettable that he directed only one more film, though he's gone on to a long career as a TV producer. For Devil's Express he threw a lot of stuff at the screen to see what would stick, and that's almost certain to leave at least something for some of us to like.

KOMMISSAR X: THREE GOLDEN CATS (1966)

At the height of the Sixties spy-film craze the Germans made a series of seven films based on the pulp fiction character Kommissar X, who despite the name is neither a Communist nor even a spy but a globetrotting American private eye. Three Golden Cats (also known in the U.S. as Death is Nimble, Death is Quick) is the second film of the series. As they did throughout, Tony Kendall plays Joe "Kommissar X" Walker -- the nickname isn't used here -- and Brad Harris plays his sort of friend/sort of rival, policeman Tom Rowland. Co-directed by Rudolf Zehetgruber and Gianfranco Parolini, the latter later best known for the Sabata spaghetti westerns, the film benefits greatly from its Sri Lanka locations and the colorful cinematography of Klaus von Rautenfeld. Our heroes end up in the erstwhile Ceylon to protect an American heiress (Ann Smyrner) -- who seems resourceful enough not to need their help much -- from the kidnappers of the Golden Cats, a former anti-imperialist guerrilla group that turned into gangsters-for-hire after independence.

Behind the Golden Cats, we learn toward the end, is a mad scientist who wanted ransom money to finance the biological warfare projects that got him thrown out of the U.S. This Bondish sort of villain exists mostly to put some of the protagonists in a death trap and is completely eclipsed,  by the Cats' head karate killer, King (former Hercules Dan Vadis). This may be Vadis's finest hour on film. Bald and mustachioed and coolly glowering, making a fetish of donning a headband before a kill, King has an indisputable menacing charisma that upstages the ostensible stars on every occasion. Vadis and Harris staged their own fight scenes -- Rowland is also a karate expert -- and did many of their own stunts in this action-packed picture. They make it look more like a precocious martial-arts movie than a Eurospy film -- the training sequence involving scantily clad Sri Lankan policewomen definitely doesn't defuse that impression -- and their final showdown in the Cats' temple is a bravura blend of camp theatrics and succinct brutality from two plausible looking bruisers.

You also get an acid attack in a shower, an assistant assassin who specializes in nitro capsules, a cool boat chase with our heroes pursued by a futuristic vehicle through an exploding swamp and a climactic collision between a speeding car and an airplane on the tarmac. You also get ladies' man Walker getting kissed by an elephant and getting dumped at the end by the heiress, an equally capable Sri Lankan heroine (Michele Mahaut) and the elephant at the same time.

Kendall's horndog antics date the picture to its time, but Harris and Vadis's commitment to pure action make Three Golden Cats feel more like a contemporary action film than may of its actual contemporaries. Judged by the standard of any time period, it's an enjoyable piece of unrepentant pop trash that inspires confidence in the rest of the series.

DVR Diary: GYMKATA (1985)

In a better world Kurt Thomas would be known as an American Olympic hero. He broke through generations of Eastern European and Japanese dominance to win the Men's All-Around title in the 1979 world gymnastics championship and was a favorite to take gold in the 1980 Moscow Olympics until the U.S. pulled its team out of the games to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Thomas did not stick around to be part of the 1984 Olympic team, which won a team gold in a games tainted by a tit-for-tat Warsaw Pact boycott. In this context, Gymkata looks like a desperate bid for the fame Thomas may have felt he deserved from athletics, but my suspicion is that Robert Clouse's film, or something like it, probably would have happened even had Thomas gone to Moscow and won the gold. Exactly because he would have been an American hero, someone in Hollywood would want to exploit his fame. The same thinking immortalized Bruce Jenner's masculinity on film in the unlikely musical vehicle Can't Stop the Music. Gymkata at least gave Thomas an opportunity to put his face on screen. By comparison, some of his comrades who persevered and won gold in 1984 also made movies, but they were usually stuntmen wearing Ninja Turtle costumes. Thomas, the star of that generation of gymnasts, would be showcased as a leading man and exposed as an actor of inflexible woodenness, and his film would live in infamy.

Someone had the idea, less obvious in hindsight, that someone with Thomas's acrobatic prowess would make an excellent martial-arts hero. That insight delivered him into the hands of Clouse, who could always be identified, at a minimum, as the director of Enter the Dragon to give subsequent films the illusion of expertise. More recently, Clouse had bungled Jackie Chan's American starring debut, The Big Brawl, apparently because he had come to believe his own hype and thought he could direct fight scenes better than Chan. While Chan might have disputed the claim, Thomas would bring no such pretense to Gymkata. The remarkable thing about Clouse is that after Gymkata he was called on again to put over a martial-arts prospect, directing Cynthia Rothrock in two China O'Brien movies in the late Eighties.

Gymkata portrays the invention of a new martial art as part of an American intelligence project. The government believes that Jonathan Cabot's gymastics prowess will give him an advantage in securing the use of the nation of Parmistan for the U.S. "Star Wars" missile-defense program. For the traditionalist Parmistanis and their monarch (Buck Kartalian) to even consider granting rights to the Americans, our representative must prevail in an ancient competition known to us simply as "The Game." Foreigners in Parmistan are entertained by being compelled to run a nationwide gauntlet, with all citizens eligible, within the rules, to kill them. Cabot's father has already tried the Game and has gone missing for his trouble. Jonathan thus has the filial duty to find his father, or avenge him, to enhance his patriotic motivation to take part in the Game.

"Gymkata" -- never named as such in the story, if I recall right, is invented on the fly as a variety of martial artists help Jonathan adapt his gymnastic disciplines into combat techniques. His training ranges from getting beat up a lot to walking up flights of stairs on his hands -- Clouse visually emphasizes Thomas's hand strength but there's no real payoff to this in the form of extra striking power, as would seem obvious to any Chinese director -- while his cultural advisor, a half-Parmistani, half-Indonesian princess (Techie Agbayani) engages him in knife fights to remind him not to trust anyone. The Princess's own position is insecure, as the King's top advisor and game master (Richard Norton) covets not only her hand but her father's throne. Jonathan will find himself not only running and fighting for his life, and not only hunting for his father, but rescuing Parmistan from a coup d'etat that will throw its strategic location and resources to "the other side" of the Cold War.

Whatever its other consequences, the U.S. alliance with the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets revived the idea of heroic barbarians in the modern world, or just plain barbarians, in the pop/pulp imagination. Gymkata's Parmistan is a preposterous place ruled over by a community theater's idea of a comic-opera sultan, where the sort of savage customs a penny-a-word might imagine to make rent money -- the film is, in fact, based on a 1957 novel -- still prevail. For all that Gymkata looks like a throwback to Saturday matinee serials, it makes sure to include masked warriors who could be taken for ninjas by undiscriminating up-to-date audiences. At select moments, when props permit, Thomas uses all his gymkata skills to fight off a nation of hunters. In an early scene, a bar built between buildings in an alley enables our hero to take out enemies with a succession of giant swings, his antagonists dutifully walking into range to take their medicine before Cabot accidentally wallops a civilian in his berserker rage. In the film's most infamous scene, Cabot discovers a pommel horse -- I presume it's meant to be a hitching post -- in the middle of Parmistan's notorious "village of the damned," where all the nation's homicidal maniacs are confined. That discovery enables Thomas to do his signature gymnastics move, the Thomas Flair, to fend off the crazies with flying feet in all directions while they, being crazy, never think to throw something at him to stop his legs. The entire village sequence is a lugubrious side trip into attempted horror or the trippy absurdity of Circle of Iron. It kills what momentum the film had dead, though some bad-movie connoisseurs may find this part its most entertaining. At least no one talks in that part, so one is spared Thomas's acting. Typical of his line reading is this dramatic response to the news that the villain has kidnapped the princess: "Not for long, 'cause .........I'll kill him." The truly awful thing about Gymkata is that Thomas isn't even its worst actor. That honor probably goes to Buck Kartalian, whose vaudevillian capers as the Khan kill anyone's attempted immersion in the film's fantasy world, though Eric Lawson in his brief appearance as Thomas's father is, if anything, even more wooden, being an older tree, than his onscreen offspring. For all that Clouse and his writers want Gymkata to be some weird experience, it has none of the artistic insanity that redeems many another bad movie with indulgent audiences. It is all empty exploitation, a stinker by committee, soullessly stupid, something to be laughed at, not with, with no skewed view of society of humanity for audiences to even try sharing. Yet people still find plenty to laugh at in it, it seems, so Gymkata and Kurt Thomas will live on in movie memory.

Too Much TV: IRON FIST (2017 - ?)

Word of mouth was already toxic by the time Netflix released the thirteen episodes of Iron Fist in March. The consensus among those who'd had an advance look was that it was easily, by far, the worst of the Marvel Studios Netflix productions. It was troubled before the reviews started coming in, thanks to a stunning bit of "p.c." overreach that saw people demand that the protagonist, Danny Rand, be played by an Asian man. The idea that a blonde white man would become the world's greatest martial artist, offended many who decried a "white savior" trope, as well as some who no doubt simply wanted an Asian actor to get a big payday. Once people finally saw it for themselves, Iron Fist seemed to add injury to insult. Not only was a white man the world's greatest martial artist, at least theoretically, but the martial arts themselves, to many observers, were lame. People simply expected a very different sort of show -- something more like Into the Badlands in modern dress, perhaps -- from what Marvel and Netflix delivered.

Iron Fist stands apart from its sibling shows in the Defenders cycle by abandoning the grungy inner-city milieux of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage for the corporate heights of Marvel's Manhattan. Danny Rand (Finn Jones) is super-rich in the comics and is supposed to be on television, but the show introduces him as an Oliver Queen-like castaway reintroducing himself to 21st century America, albeit without the publicity attending the TV Ollie's rescue. A disheveled, barefoot Danny returns home after growing up, having survived the plane crash that killed his parents, in the magical land of Kun-L'un, where he was taught to be The Iron Fist, a living weapon of defense against The Hand, the yellow peril last referenced in Daredevil's second season. As Iron Fist, Danny can channel his chi to make his punching hand like unto a thing of iron, as they used to say in the funnybooks. It glows white-hot and can punch through walls with devastating force. Despite the responsibility placed upon him, Danny's in New York to reclaim his heritage as heir to Rand Enterprises, which has been maintained since the Rand family's disappearance by the children of Harold Meachum, the partner of Danny's dad. The kids, Ward (Tom Pelphrey) and Joy (Jessica Stroup) don't know what to make of this hairy hobo beating up guards in the lobby of corporate headquarters. Ward, an addict who bullied Danny when they were kids, distrusts the stranger whether he's Danny or not, while Joy more quickly comes to believe our hero's odd story. While he struggles to sort things out with the corporation, Danny hangs out at a more Netflix-typical inner-city dojo run by part-time cage fighter Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick). It's so typically Netflix a setting that Defenders mascot-in-advance Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) is one of Colleen's students.

The corporate shenanigans continue as we learn Harold Meachum himself (David Wenham), believed long dead by the general public, is alive and in hiding from The Hand, represented by Mme. Gao (Wai Ching Ho) from the Daredevil show. Harold is Ward's puppetmaster but finds himself at odds with his boy, who'd like to get rid of Danny while Dad thinks the kung-fu kid could be useful to him. Publicly acknowledged, Danny has a tumultuous stint on the Rand board of directors that leads to he and the Meachums getting sacked by the board majority, while he, Colleen and Claire battle drug smugglers in New York and China. Things get still more complicated as we discover that The Hand has contending factions, one of which has Colleen as a member, while Ward decides to free himself from his father but finds him very difficult to get rid of, and Danny's old Kun-L'un schoolmate (Sacha Dhawan) arrives in Manhattan to convince our hero to resume his duties at the alma mater.

I actually appreciated the change of pace and setting Iron Fist provided, and one of the show's most pleasant surprises is Ward Meachum's character arc. Ward starts out as the show's number-one scumbag, but as he sobers up and recoils from his dad's unnatural antics he gradually becomes one of the good guys. Tom Pelphrey gives the best performance of the series so far, except maybe for David Wenham's unpredictably devious Harold. Finn Jones has come in for a lot of criticism for a perceived lack of charisma, acting talent and martial arts skills, but those are the limitations of a generic fish-out-of-water character, not necessarily those of an actor who proves himself likable enough. More likable still is Jessica Henwick, if only because Colleen Wing brings more obvious passion to her fight scenes, and is likely to inspire more passion in the male audience. As for the fighting, it is plainly less dynamic, though often better lit, than the standard-setting scenes on Daredevil or the superhuman stunts of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. You can't help thinking that Danny will be the weakest member of The Defenders later this summer, but if Iron Fist disappoints as a martial-arts show it's mainly because the writers had a lot of story to tell and not so much time for fighting as fans would have liked. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt, however, I found myself in later episodes marking time impatiently before something (violent) happened. In a way, there was both too much and not enough going on much of the time, and I also suspect that Iron Fist had the lowest budget of any of the Marvel shows so far. It's hard to dispute that it's the weakest of the four shows, but the others set a high enough standard that this one can fall short and still be at least okay. In any event, let's reserve judgment until Defenders on whether we want to see more of Danny Rand after that.

Too Much TV: INTO THE BADLANDS (2015-?)

If Into the Badlands had only one thing to recommend it, that would be that it's the best martial-arts show in the history of American television. Most of the show's production values appear to be invested in staging the fight scenes, which rise by the end of the first six-episode season to a level of kinetic energy that puts most superhero shows to shame. The postapocalyptic setting -- some technology survives but guns apparently haven't -- frees Badlands from any obligation to realism, allowing creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (of Smallville fame) to indulge every fantasy of martial and spiritual superpower until the characters who appear in the last episode to make mincemeat of our hitherto-invincible protagonist may as well be comic-book supervillains -- if they're villains at all, that is. Badlands thrives on ambiguity, though it leans toward cynicism. There may be no good guys at all in this world, except maybe for the protagonist, Sunny (Daniel Wu). He's a Clipper, an elite fighter and killer who serves Quinn (Marton Csokas), one of the Barons who rule the Badlands. Somehow Sunny has a sense of honor that sometimes clashes with Quinn's amoral or simply impulsive imperatives. For example, when his doctor gives him a terminal diagnosis Quinn wants it covered up and orders Sunny to kill the doctor and his wife. Sunny won't do it, in part because their daughter (Madeleine Mantock) is his secret girlfriend, so Quinn, a formidable warrior in his own right, has to do the job himself. Sunny is so invaluable, however, that Quinn lets a normally fatal act of insubordination pass, little knowing that, worse still in the world of genre TV, Sunny's keeping secrets from him. The first secret is the girlfriend, who ends up the local doctor by default, from whom Sunny must keep secret his own passive complicity in her parents' deaths. The next secret takes us to the meat of the show.

In the first episode Sunny rescues a teenager (Aramis Knight) known only as M.K. -- for Mortal Kombat??? -- from some marauding nomads. M.K. looks like a likely Colt or apprentice clipper for Quinn's army, but Sunny doesn't realize exactly what potential the boy has until M.K. bleeds in a training bout. Shed his blood and M.K. becomes a black-eyed wrecking machine of superhuman power. The Badlands Barons have a vague notion of such people existing. The one female Baron, known as The Widow (Emily Beecham) has the best notion of what M.K. is and wants him, as an exception to her usual all-female rule (not counting some guys who are clearly cannon fodder) as a secret weapon against the other Barons, whom she sees, at least for propaganda purposes, as perpetuators of an oppressive patriarchy. Complicating her plans are Sunny, for starters, and the stirring of feminine feelings for M.K. in one of the Widow's Butterflies, her equivalents of Colts and/or Clippers. Worse yet, Tilda (Ally Ioannides) apparently is the Widow's own daughter, unless "Mother" is an honorific all Butterflies use. Sunny's challenge is to keep M.K.'s potential secret from Quinn, who'd exploit the boy just as the Widow wants to, keep M.K. safe from the Widow herself, and find out why M.K. has a medallion similar to one of his own, showing an Oz-like towered city called Azra. Sunny's endgame is to escape the Badlands with M. K. and Veil the doctor and learn more about his own possible connection to this mysterious place.

Meanwhile, Quinn has more problems that his health and the Widow's aggression. His wives are scheming against each other and one of them sleeps with his son, who's also plotting a double-coup d'etat with a Clipper from another barony. How are you supposed to run an opium plantation with all this drama? No wonder Quinn's head hurts, but that's not the only thing that'll hurt before the season's over. Hardly anyone gets away unscathed, as the final episode kills folks off and throws multiple cliffhangers at us in its bid for renewal.

I'd like to see a second season. Daniel Wu is a bit of a stiff as an actor but still projects the stalwart quality that's essential for Sunny to be our protagonist. He's surrounded by far more colorful characters and benefits from the contrast, appearing more the oldschool strong, relatively silent type. In any event, Wu isn't here to act; he's here to fight and, boy, does he fight! See above: best martial arts I've seen on American television. The other actors, particularly Csokas and Beecham, put up decent fights themselves. Beyond that, Badlands has that essential feel of a thoroughly imagined fantasy world with lots left for us to explore in future seasons. Oddly, and to preview a future review slightly, I found the fantasy world of Badlands more convincing than that of Gough and Millar's other big project, The Shannara Chronicles, even though that show's based on a long-running series of fantasy novels. I suspect that venue makes a big difference in overall quality. Shannara is on MTV while Badlands is on AMC, home of Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Walking Dead, and thus has a very high standard to maintain, but not a demographically narrow audience to pander to. It'll never live up to those other shows' standard of writing or acting, I presume -- I watch or have watched exactly none of them -- but after just six episodes Badlands is already a strong contender for best action show on television. Imagine where it might go if given a chance to really cut loose.

DVR Diary: MARCO POLO (1975)

The first time I saw Chang Cheh's historical epic, before I knew who Chang Cheh was, it was called The Four Assassins. I saw it on some local independent channel's kung fu theater time slot, and it was memorable for me because it was the first time (that I can now recall) I saw the sort of baroque training sequences that typified kung fu movies from the mid Seventies through the early Eighties. To me and my friends it was all laughably absurd, but on seeing it again recently (in the proper aspect ration on the El Rey channel) I found the training bits some of the most dramatically effective I've seen in the genre. The four Chinese heroes of the story, rebels against Kublai Khan, who has appointed the famous Venetian trader (American-Italian star Richard Harrison, who'd end up in more martial arts movies than he could ever imagine) a constable to hunt them down, are rusticating on the friendly estate of a former kung fu master. They hope for training but as the Mongols have made martial arts illegal, the best the old man can do is give them jobs as manual laborers. Some of these jobs can't be done in the conventional manner because the tools that are normally used have also been banned, since they can be used as weapons. In the worst case, one of our heroes must harvest bamboo without a blade; he must twist the tough branches between and around his legs until they snap, shredding himself in the process. Another hero has to sift some very coarse grain with his bare hands and arms; the stuff scratches even worse than iron failings. The others aren't technologically limited but are heavily burdened just the same; one must clear a field of heavy boulders, while the last gets comeuppance for peeing in Marco Polo's soup earlier in the picture by having to empty some open-air latrines. In what was the funniest bit for me, his boss -- all the heroes have taskmasters who clearly were  fighting masters in their day -- warns this guy not to fall into the pisspits. Our hero's not worried; he boasts that he could leap right out if he fell in, not realizing until the boss throws him in that the urine comes up to his ribcage. It is now his regular job to practice jumping out of the pit until he graduates into jumping straight from one pit into another, and from that to another. The long-term payoff for the story is that each hero develops extraordinary abilities from their labors. Jumping, obviously; Samson-like strength for the boulder guy; devastating hand strength for the grain guy, who also has to work the mill's whetstone with his hands until it's smooth; and a powerful, near-invulnerable lower body for the bamboo guy -- an aid to his "pugilism," which for this film doesn't seem to mean what we think it means. The short-term payoff is a great scene in which the heroes reunite after their first day at work and are utterly exhausted -- and in the case of the latrine guy, vile smelling. The four actors do a great job selling their exhaustion and initial bafflement at their new condition, and the separate chores do a lot to individualize them, as is often the case in Chang Cheh's tales of collective heroism. Those scenes stuck in my memory for thirty years or more not just because they were absurd, but because they were good.

The first time around I had no idea of when The Four Assassins was made or even of who Richard Harrison was, much less Chang Cheh. Watching Marco Polo now and knowing when it was made, I can't help seeing it as a critical allegory from Hong Kong of the west's detente with Communist China. While American Marco Polo movies often portray Kublai Khan as a wise, almost lovable old ruler, Marco Polo portrays him unambiguously as a despot whose Mongol repression of the Han echoes Mao Zedong's Communist repression of Chinese traditions. Bedazzled by the power and pomp of the ruler's court, the foreign trader-diplomat almost unconsciously becomes a collaborator. Did Chang Cheh and co-writer Ni Kuang mean to warn that a western rapprochement with the People's Republic would likewise further consolidate the tyranny that westerners claimed to deplore? If so, they also close on a hopeful note after the four heroes awaken Polo to the truth of Mongol tyranny as experienced by ordinary Chinese. Would you like it if the Mongols took over Venice and did the same thing? they ask. Marco gets the point and aids the good guys, albeit passively, in their final showdown with the Mongol enforcers who are the film's real villains.  The four-way climax is a nicely paced job of direction and editing punctuated by epic feats of strength from the boulder guy. I remember finding it hilarious decades ago how his weightlifting left him able to punch holes through and push down thickly mortared walls before taking dozens down with him Samson style. There's still a certain naivete to the effects but now that I'm more in the spirit of martial-arts cinema I recognize and respect the patriotic exuberance of all the heroic destruction. As a veteran of peplum (or "Hercules") films maybe Harrison gave the Chinese some pointers. It's unlikely the ostensible star -- the Venetian's transliterated name is the film's original Chinese title -- had much or any creative input but in a manner befitting his presence there's a peplum quality of virtuous heroism that fits nicely with Chang Cheh's typical concerns. One could argue, after all, that the kung fu genre was the true global heir of the peplum after Italy abandoned musclemen for amoral spaghetti westerners, and Harrison's presence here is like a belated acknowledgment of the torch having passed to worthy successors.

ENTER THE NINJA (1981)

 

Every time the conversation turns to ninja movies I have to remind people of the moment in You Only Live Twice when Tiger Tanaka introduces James Bond to his modern ninjas. On a firing range we see these ninjas firing machine guns, throwing hand grenades, and so on. Pretty cool. The film is from 1967, and cinematic ninja have grown only less modern since then. What the hell? Well, what happened, obviously, was the rise of martial-arts cinema as a global genre. These appealed to a romantic if not atavistic sentiment of their time, inspiring fantasies of ancient wisdom and personal discipline overcoming oppressive technological modernity. Archetypally speaking, there's not much difference between a ninja -- a good ninja, I mean -- and an Ewok. So by the end of the Seventies we had Eric von Lustbader's novels, Frank Miller's comics, The Octagon, and finally Enter the Ninja, a film that bestrides two eras. It looks forward to the Eighties as the work of two of that decade's defining genre producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and an early showcase for the movie ninja of the decade, Sho Kosugi. But it looks to the past in its casting of Franco Nero as its hero. The implausibility of casting has never stopped Nero. If he can be a western gunslinger and a singing knight of Camelot, he can damn well be a ninja.

I'm told that there are versions of Menahem Golan's film in which Nero, as he reportedly prefers, speaks his own English dialogue, but Netflix isn't streaming that version. If anything, the superimposition of an alien voice only exacerbates what I see as Nero's visible discomfort with the project. Nevertheless, he plays Cole, whom we learn was once a mercenary fighting wars in Africa -- virtually a modern ninja already -- who for reasons never made clear quit the business in order to learn, in Japan, how to be a traditional ninja. The film opens with his final exam. Cole's white-clad bulk crashes through the woods, slaughtering all in his path, until he confronts and decapitates an old master. The master, head attached, promptly reappears for the graduation ceremony. All the mayhem and gore we'd seen were fake, the master's erstwhile head merely papier-mache. Cole has to recite the nine principles of ninjistu in order to graduate and nails them. But bigoted Hasegawa (Kusugi) protests that no foreigner can be a true ninja. Fortunately, his opinion counts for crap with the sensei and Cole is sent out into the world to follow the ninja way of helping the helpless and oppressed. But how will his bleeding-heart-liberal ninjitsu stand up to the rage of raw capitalism?

Cole heads to the Philippines, where his old mercenary pal Frank Landers -- Alex Courtney plays him like a hastily drawn and drunken-voiced cartoon of James Caan -- runs a plantation with his English wife Mary Ann (Susan George). Nero may as well be back in the Old West. Here, as there, an evil financier (Christopher George, no relation to Susan) covets the good people's land. The sinister Mr. Venarius, who keeps synchronized swimmers in his deluxe pool as a "living mobile," has sent a goon squad to the outskirts of Manila to drive the Landers' workers off the farm and the Landers off their land. The goon squad is led by Siegfried Schultz (Zachi Noy), a Teutonic leperchaun with a hook hand who is duly humiliated when Cole defends his friends. Our hero rips Schultzie's hook clean off, which helps convince Venarius that he needs a better class of goon. After Cole and another new buddy, the transplanted old codger "Dollars" (Will Hare) ruin Venarius's attempt to negotiate a sale at gunpoint, our villain learns that the Landers' protector is a ninja. "I want a ninja!" he demands -- I paraphrase -- "I want a ninja now!"

 

The forces of evil converge ...

Venarius's faithful flunky Mr. Carter (Constantine Gregory) dutifully flies to Tokyo and does what anyone would do to find a ninja: he goes to a talent agency. Miraculously, Carter ends up at Cole's old school, where he explains to the sensei, without naming names, that a bad man is terrorizing Mr. Venarius's business concerns. This looks like a job for Hasegawa, whose idea of defending the oppressed includes slitting Frank Landers' throat, kidnapping Mary Ann, burning down the farmhouses and cackling evilly. I'm not sure sensei would approve, and I know Cole doesn't. He happened to be out on a lark with Dollars, raiding Venarius's corporate headquarters and leaving his guards in compromising positions, as all this went down, receiving only Hasegawa's selfie film of a recent kill as a warning of what's to come.

 

Above, Mr. Carter's, "I think I've been hurt, sir," is my favorite line of the film.

 

Below: Senator McCain, this is human cockfighting.

To save Mary Ann, Cole must face another gang of useless guards and eliminate Venarius himself before confronting Hasegawa in a cockfighting arena. You might think that since Nero's ninja costume makes it very easy for a stuntman to replace him in all but the close-ups that this formal finale would be a truly climactic battle, but you'd be wrong. Kosugi and his stunt-opponent may be talented, but the fight choreography and direction lumber along as if Nero himself were fighting in his big white jammies. It doesn't help that our good ninja suddenly starts fighting dirty, blowing chalk into poor Hasegawa's face to get an early advantage. But I guess a ninja's gotta do what a ninja's gotta do, especially when the woman he now loves -- Frank having disqualified himself before death by drinking himself into impotence, and Mary Ann having seduced Cole in his guest room -- is in danger. After one of the clumsiest finishes to a swordfight I've seen, good triumphs, while Hasegawa gets the consolation prize of a genuine decapitation. But it was Sho Kosugi who'd live to fight another day, and another, and plenty more after that for Golan-Globus and others. while Nero never made another martial arts movie. That leaves Enter the Ninja looking like a rough draft of ninja films to come, but as the wellspring from which they flowed it still has a lot to answer for.

DVR Diary: LADY WITH A SWORD (Feng Fei Fei, 1971)

Kao Pao Shu was a veteran Shaw Bros. actress who moved behind the camera to make her directorial debut with Feng Fei Fei. So is it because she was a woman that this is one of the more tearjerking martial arts pictures? Hard to say, since a man, the prolific I Kuang, wrote the screenplay. But I still wonder whether the prevailing unhappiness of the picture reflects a feminine touch. Lots of martial arts films end unhappily, but usually that's because all the characters are dead. There are plenty of survivors at the end of Lady With a Sword, by comparison, but they're all very unhappy. It's hard to blame them, though.

I wonder whether writer or director saw the American western Last Train From Gun Hill. In that picture Kirk Douglas destroys his old friendship with Anthony Quinn because he, a lawman, has to take Quinn's son to prison. Feng Fei Fei escalates the emotional stakes of the basic situation to an almost unbearable level. The title character (Lily Ho) goes into action when her young nephew staggers into the family compound to report that his mother, Fei Fei's sister, has been raped and murdered. She learns that the culprit (James Nam) is the scion of a family, the Jins, who've long been friends with hers. Worse, he is her childhood friend and the man everyone considers her destined husband. He's fallen under bad influences, egged on by his retainers, one of whom calls in his brother, a formidable bandit with a small arsenal of weapons, to protect his master. The brother is a bigger villain than anyone; he murdered Fei Fei's brother-in-law and seeks to exploit the deteriorating situation, with his younger brother's help, to destroy both families. Meanwhile, the Jin family is coming apart at the seams. Dad (Li Peng-Fei) is ready to wash his hands of his wayward boy or hand him to Fei Fei, but Mom (Ching Lin), whom Dad blames for spoiling the boy, is protective to a fault. She's the Anthony Quinn character in this story, and pretty much the woman who wears the sword in the Jin household. When Fei Fei manages to strongarm Jin Lian Bai out of the compound to deliver him to the magistrate, the mother pursues with the untrustworthy retainers in tow, and they see a golden opportunity to escalate the feud between Jin and Feng....

Novice director Kao makes impressive use of a small town set in early fight scenes when Fei Fei and her nephew (Yuen Man Meng) are a team. Fighting with Lian Bai's buddies, Fei Fei fends off several attackers at one end of town while the kid struggles to escape another in a restaurant and stable. Commanding overhead shots sweep across town establishing the good guys' relative positions as they battle for their lives. The nephew has a story arc that might trouble western viewers. There's almost always an element of slapstick to the little guy with the silly tuft of hair on top as he falls on his face repeatedly trying to dismount his horse. Some of his escapes in the fight scene I mentioned are silly, including teeter-totter gags that were old before talkies. He meets cute with a young girl on a caravan, but any hope of a happy future is dashed when Lian Bai kills him during an escape attempt. Some people may be uncomfortable with such a traumatized child being used for comedy relief only to get brutally killed -- the film ends with Fei Fei weeping over his corpse -- but I suspect most people around the world are more ready to laugh or weep on short notice over the vicissitudes of life. The overall sadness of the picture may well reflect a more humane spirit in this particular director; Kuang wrote so much that it's hard to credit him with any singluar sensibility. Another director might have ended the picture with the deaths of the evil brothers; in a charming touch Fei Fei's mom and dad both ride to her rescue, while Lian Bai's dad doesn't buy the brothers' attempt to blame everything on the Fengs. Many martial arts films end with that sort of violent catharsis (see Lady Assassin in particular). Kao seems more interested in the emotional consequences for the survivors. If that's a personal touch then more power to her.

DVR Diary: THE LADY ASSASSIN (1983)

My cable guide told me I was going to see a 2013 Vietnamese film, and while that wouldn't be impossible on the El Rey network, it was still unlikely. It was, more predictably, Another Shaw Bros. Production, one of several "Lady" pictures the inclusive action channel scheduled recently to mark International Women's Day. The original Chinese title translates to something like "Palace of Revelations," but it does have a lady assassin, and several other female fighters besides, as well as a female producer, Mona Fong. The real auteur is writer-director Lu Chin-Ku, whose most important collaborators were editors Chiang Hsing-Lung and Liu Shao-Kwang. They give this tale of dynastic intrigue an increasingly frantic quality as the drama accelerates toward an over-the-top climax. This later Shaw release apparently never got a wide U.S. release, so El Rey showed it with English subtitles. I always appreciate this despite my nostalgia for the corny accents of dubbed films because you see (and hear) that the Shaw performers could actually act. Since Lady Assassin takes it dramatic plot quite seriously -- it really is an ambitiously made picture -- I was glad that some awkward voice didn't take me out of the story. The subject is the rivalry of two princes, sons of a dying Emperor of the Ching (aka Manchu) dynasty. "Fourth Prince" (Tony Liu) would seem to have a built-in advantage over "Fourteenth Prince" but the younger man is the more virtuous and gets promoted to general, making him the favorite for the succession. In fact, the decision has already been made, but Fourth Prince thinks he can change the Emperor's words if not his mind. This is where the lady assassin, Lui Si Niang (Leanne Liu) comes in. Her skills as a thief and acrobat are truly useful to Fourth Prince. After a bit of Raiders-inspired business to determine where the imperial succession decree has been located, she and her assistants steal it out of a high ceiling panel. Fourth Prince is then able to edit the document so that it proclaims him the next emperor. The decree in doctored form is read aloud while the emperor is on his deathbed, but he's too feeble, and Fourth Prince is too close, to correct the error. Fourteenth Prince makes the mistake, not knowing any better, of acknowledging Fourth as the new rightful Emperor Yongcheng, thus undercutting his ability to raise a resistance to him. Meanwhile, Fourth Prince had won the support of Lui Si Niang and other heroes of the martial world with a promise to end the Manchu policy of discrimination against indigenous Han Chinese. His intentions are good at first, but his Manchu advisers find it all too easy to change his mind with warnings against a Han uprising. In general Yongcheng doesn't like to feel dependent on anyone. When a warrior he promoted to General makes a big, humiliating show of his exclusive control over his army, the Emperor acts quickly to break him. His estrangement from Lui Si Niang and the other fighters eventually puts all their lives in jeopardy.

Lady Assassin works just as well as a historical drama as a wuxia film. The ruthlessness of the intrigue and its violent results might appeal to Game of Thrones fans, and the production values are often quite impressive. The art direction by Chen Ching-Shen and the cinematography by Ma Ching-Chiang often enhance the mood with expressive framing and lighting. I liked the acting as far as I can appreciate it with no knowledge of Chinese, the standouts being the two princes. Tony Liu is fine as the weaselly Fourth Prince, while Max Mok pulls off the more thankless task of conveying the tragic weakness and ultimate cluelessness of Fourteenth Prince. The martial arts might not appeal to purists. Lu Chin-Ku depends heavily on editing to assemble fight scenes but what he may sacrifice in verisimilitude he makes up for in pace and dramatic momentum. Some of the effects he tries don't work, especially the rapid-fire repetition of fighters' entrances. But when Lu and the editors really get going the fight scenes have the dynamic pictorial energy of the better superhero comics. They sometimes edit so rapidly that watching is like reading a comic from panel to panel. The team goes into overdrive for the final battle, when Lui Si Niang leads an attempt to assassinate the Emperor. As the editing gets faster than ever, the violence gets still more extreme. In the end, Lady Assassin is the sort of kung fu film I remember from my childhood that ends abruptly with an exhilarating kill. In fact, this film has two such moments within seconds of each other, with one villain cut in half after an exhausting battle and another cut in half lengthwise at the very last moment by the heroine's virtual orgasm of righteous murder. I admit that I was in suspense partly because I was afraid the film was going to run past the length of my DVR recording, but I suspect that audiences not operating under my time constraint would share my bloodthirsty exhilaration at the stunning finish. Lady Assassin wasn't the film I expected, but I suspect I'm better off for that.

DVR Diary: THE WEIRD MAN (1983)

The English title pretty accurately describes what you'll see in Chang Cheh's film, the last the legendary martial-arts director made for the Shaw Bros. studio, but I had a feeling the original Chinese title wouldn't be so tantalizingly prosaic. I ran the original through a couple of online translation programs and discovered that Shaw Bros. intended some sort of play on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Google produced "Theurgy and the Sundance Kid" while Bing offered "Avatar vs. Cassidy." Since The Weird Man is not a buddy movie, the studio may have hoped to convey the dual nature of its protagonist, but that's just my desperate guess. After some perfunctory court intrigue, featuring bad acting by the dubbing artists I heard on the El Rey broadcast, we're introduced to Yu Ji, a Taoist priest with the power to heal. The picture sets him up as a Christlike figure, or else people from the Christian world are likely to see him that way. The powers that be scheme to destroy him, while he tells his five disciples that he's destined to die so he can be reborn. He is challenged to produce rain for a drought-stricken city or die on a pyre. He refuses to perform on demand, but the skies open up just as his pyre is lit. The people demand that Yu Ji be spared, but he's decapitated instead, smoke billowing from his neck. This, apparently, is just what he planned.

Yu Ji's disciples are under strict instructions on how to treat his body. They manage to snatch the head and body and reunite them in a mystic pool, the corpse floating toward the head until it reattaches. The hirsute priest is restored and assumes a meditative pose as his new body literally springs to life: a younger, clean-shaven figure in a loincloth. If anyone in the picture is a Weird Man, it's this guy. Yu Ji has gone to all this trouble in order to become an omnipotent mischief maker. He can possess other people's bodies -- actor Ricky Cheng Tien Chi dons drag when he takes over women -- and use them to fight the bad guys. Try to slice him and he strikes back with silk scarves, soap bubbles, balloons, etc. His only vulnerability is that he must touch base with his old body once each day, once a disciple has tapped old Yu Ji's forehead three times. That done, he can promptly return to wherever he was making mischief before. If it is not done, is that the end of the Weird Man? Unfortunately, we never really find out. Chang Cheh apparently expects us to find the title character's cavorting hilarious or else, at the end of the line with Shaw Bros., he doesn't give a damn anymore. I found it all too reminiscent of bad sci-fi comedies where aliens have all sorts of wacky powers, usually including telekinesis so they can levitate people, just because ... you know .. they're advanced! In the title role, Ricky Cheng Tien Chi and his perpetual smirk are pretty insufferable, but I must admit that the film as a whole has the same sort of allure that a trainwreck has. It was terrible, but I couldn't look away. That may be a recommendation for some people, and it's definitely as close to one as you're going to see here.

THE RAID 2: BERANDAL (2014)

The greatest superhero in movies today is Rama, the martial-arts policeman played by Iko Uwais in the Raid movies directed by Gareth Evans. His fight scenes, which Uwais choreographs along with co-star Yayan Ruhian, have the sort of relentless action comic book fans have always wanted in Batman movies but haven't yet seen. Rama doesn't have any more super powers than Batman does, but Evans, Uwais and Ruhian give their hero as much ferocity, resilience and stamina -- creative editing helps, too -- as American crimefighters have in comic books, but not on film. The Raid movies -- a third is most likely in the works -- are comic book movies, regardless of their gritty urban trappings. They take place in an Indonesia -- as I wrote about the original film, this may reflect reality in the country -- where guns are apparently reserved for the criminal elite, and the foot soldiers must rely on their feet, or their hands, or blades, or whatever's at hand. Raid 2 is even more a comic book movie than its predecessor because it has more blatantly gimmicky fighters. At one point Rama has to fight a brother-sister assassination team. The sister fights Oldboy-style, with hammers, smashing with the heads, slashing with the claws. Just for the hell of it, she's a deaf-mute. Her brother has a baseball fetish, fighting at close quarters with an aluminum bat or making deadly missiles out of batted balls.

We know they'll be formidable adversaries because we've seen them cut swaths through hosts of gunless bodyguards in pursuit of their gangster quarry. In fact, they give Rama trouble for a few minutes, but they only set the stage for our hero's mano-a-mano showdown with a nameless assassin who had taken him down with abrupt ease earlier in the picture. For action filmmakers Evans and his colleagues are great at dramatic pacing, since this one-on-one fight is the true highlight of a picture that has already given us several epic-scale mass melees, including a riot in a muddy prison yard that must have been an ultimate challenge to fight choreographers. Uwais and Cecep Arif Rahman are not dwarfed by the earlier spectacle; their fight is intimately epic in a Homeric way. Rama's victory may be inevitable, but Uwais earns it while allowing Rahman to shine; the bad guy gives as good as he gets down to the final seconds of the battle. The plot of the story remains to be resolved, but this fight can't help make the denouement look anticlimactic.

There's no raid in Raid 2. Instead Evans has opened his narrative up to encompass the archetypes of global crime cinema. Born out of ideas he had before making The Raid, Berandal quickly dispatches the surviving supporting cast from the first film and gives Rama a new mission. To root out corrupt cops in Jakarta, our hero must get himself sent to prison -- by beating up a politician's son -- to befriend Uco (Arifin Putra), the son of the local crimelord. In deep cover for two years, Rama becomes Uco's protector and is rewarded with a place in the organization of Uco's father, Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo). He sees Uco grow impatient with his position as his dad's "bill collector" and with dad's apparent kowtowing to Japanese gangsters. As Rama watches, waiting for evidence identifying cops on the take, Uco provokes a gang war and puts himself on a parricidal path. Arifin Putra's performance as Uco holds the film together, making it something more than a highlight reel of fight scenes. There's something almost poignant about Uco's frustration, his bitter recognition of the contempt with which even bar girls regard him, and his need to prove himself to his father that can only be fulfilled by killing him.

Neither Putra nor Evans entirely holds the film together. At almost 2.5 hours, Raid 2 is about a half-hour too long. To be more precise, it's too long by the time it takes to introduce a character played by Yayan Ruhian (giving him two roles in as many pictures) and eliminate him. Ruhian's storyline comes across as a gratuitous addition designed only to give him some screen time. Apart from that indulgence, the pace of the action doesn't flag and the main story is compelling enough to keep us interested between the fight scenes. Berandal carries some of the artistic risks of the quest for novelty -- the sibling killers may seem silly to some observers --  but the rewards justify those risks and compensate for any awkward moments. Aided by Uwais and Ruhian, over the course of three films (I haven't seen the earlier Merantau) Gareth Evans has become just about the best action movie director on Earth.

DVR Diary: DUEL FOR GOLD (1971)

It's so uncommon to see a Chinese martial arts picture without any sympathetic characters -- one in which all the principal characters are rats -- that it's still shocking to find one, for me at least. And here's a Shaw Bros. production directed by Chu Yuan that seems heavily inspired by westerns -- not just contemporary spaghetti westerns, as you might expect, but the darker American "adult" westerns of the 1940s and 1950s. Duel For Gold reminded me of Duel in the Sun, not just for the title but also with its spoken prologue foredooming all the characters and its no-survivors climax, and it reminded me of the less well-known Lust For Gold, possibly the most amoral American western of its era. Whoever gave the film its English title (if it isn't a literal translation of "huo bing") may have had exactly those films in mind. There's a little bit of caper movie in it, too, if your idea of a caper is for a protagonist to massacre all his or her accomplices. The general idea seems to be that people are evil, and martial arts make them worse.

It opens playfully enough with a sister act giving an open-air show of their martial prowess. The ladies have incredible balance and superhuman strength; one can hold the whole weight of her sister's body, upside down and sword out, on the point of her own sword. The crowd's wonder turns to horror as the girls inexcusably fail to clear the prop blocks they chopped to show off their swords' sharpness out of their way as they tumble. One of the sisters manages to fall on her own sword and is taken to the local treasury for first aid. However, security guard Wen (Chun Chen) finds this accident suspicious. In China's martial world these security guards are like freelance marshals of the Old West, tough men entrusted with the wealth and property of others. Wen quickly exposes the sisters' trick; they'd staged the accident in order to case the place, where they most likely know a big stash of gold will be waiting for a big merchant. It's a good thing Wen's around, because his small army of assistants is useless against the sisters' fighting skills, while he seems capable of handling both of them at once. He drives them away, but they're only the start of his problems. Lurking in town is Teng Chi Yan, the "Long Shadow" (Lo Lieh), who simply radiates menace. Meanwhile, the sisters have help for whatever their plan may be, but they have to keep an eye on the interloper Teng Chi Yan as well.

The crooks manage to lure Wen into another fight and to injure him enough that he's out of action while the big merchant paints the town red. The merchant turns out to be an impostor, however, and one of the gang. Invited to tour the mint by obsequious officials, the impostor takes out a bunch of guards, signalling an all-out attack by the crooks' own small army of all-too expendable minions. Those the guards don't kill, the lead thieves eliminate themselves. The fewer to share the loot, the better; that principle is carried out mercilessly until lovers and sisters -- not to mention one unexpected contestant -- fight a round-robin battle in a cemetery, each fighter in turn offering a deal to his or her antagonist,only to have it rejected. And of course, we've already been told how it all turns out, though there is one blackly ironic twist left for the narrator to relate.

The final fight is a brutal affair in the "kill 'em all" fashion then prevailing around the world, and the carnage effects seem less cartoonish, more bluntly brutal, than they often appear in more heroic fare. That's some sort of tribute to Chu Yuan and the overall production design. The action is well directed and choreographed. In one impressive shot, one of the sister knocks a guard out of the frame to the right, but the camera follows his tumble and catches the other sister routing more foes. The actors are as good as English dubbing permits -- I saw this on the El Rey network -- while Lo Lieh is effortlessly good as the threatening mystery man regardless of his surrogate voice. Duel For Gold might be best described as a slapstick black comedy. Like much slapstick, it revels in transgression but makes sure to punish the transgressors at the end, lest the audience regret their thrills. It may think itself dark, but it's really fun to watch if you don't judge the characters too harshly, as fate already has.

THE RAID: REDEMPTION (Serbuan Maut, 2011)

The decade's new standard for martial arts movies was set by a police thriller combining Indonesian performers and a Welsh director. Gareth Evans's Raid is the sort of action movie that may compel some American viewers to suspend disbelief as it segues from conventional cop action to martial arts mayhem. Where did the guns go? There's plenty of shooting early, but as the raiding cops, having no hope of backup and actually set up, fight their way up a tenement tower, practically a panopticon of peril, to the lair of crime lord Tama, we go from guns to machetes and finally to feet and bare hands. The transition is nearly seamless if you know what you're getting into, but Evans, who writes as well as directs, overplays his hand just a little when he has Mad Dog, one of Tama's sub-bosses, make a speech about how much more he enjoys beating people to death with his hands than he enjoys shooting or stabbing them. All pretense of urban realism falls away in that moment and The Raid stands revealed as pure pulp fiction. Anyway, Indonesia probably isn't as much of a gun culture as the U.S. or some other places. As The Act of Killing ably illustrates, people of the peninsula are often quite inventive about dispatching their enemies.

The Raid remains very much a cop film after it shows its true genre colors. Its behind-the-scenes subject is the treacherous politics of policing. The raid's commanding officer, Wahyu, doesn't tell his men until they're already in too deep that they can't expect backup because his is an unauthorized mission, his rogue action to kill or capture Tama. Wahyu's agenda is so close to his vest that he's ready to betray his men to the ultimate extent. Yet he proves a dupe, or so Tama claims when he tells the officer that he'd been tipped off about the raid and invited to kill a troublesome cop, the rest being a bonus. One gets the sense that the Jakarta police are authoritarian, ruthless and corrupt, except for an honest handful, many of whom end up sacrificed to the ambitions or rivalries of higher-ups. I could see an American film on the same subject, except it'd be guns all the way to the top floor.

I'm not complaining about The Raid, because the martial arts lived up to the film's already-lofty reputation. The highlight and instant entry in the best-fight-scene-ever sweepstakes is the two-on-one climax pitting the aforementioned Mad Dog (fight co-choreographer Yayan Ruhian) against a surviving cop and another sub-boss who happens to be the cop's brother. Again, Mad Dog takes the story into preposterous pulp territory; he has his erstwhile partner chained and is pummeling him like a heavy bag when the cop shows up. There's a pause while Mad Dog frees his captive, who proves hardly worse for wear, so our villain can test his might against two antagonists. Fastidious Mad Dog even raises the chain back up the ceiling so it won't impede the action or be used unfairly. If that sounds silly in the description, especially when I mention how the brothers wait patiently for him to finish, it's also a brilliant way for Evans to build anticipation for a battle that justifies the wait. For all the all-out mayhem he directs, Evans also proves himself quite good at suspense. He's happy to bring things to a halt after a gangster has plunged his machete repeatedly through a flimsy wall like a magician running his swords through the magic trunk with the girl in it. Our cop hero is behind the wall with a wounded partner and has just had his cheek sliced by that machete when something distracts the criminal. He has to stand there with that blade literally in his face, and he has to make sure somehow that there's no blood to tip off his pursuer when the blade is finally withdrawn. Nicely done.

Remarkably, Evans has not yet been assigned a Hollywood tentpole -- the Godzilla people went with a different Gareth -- though he did contribute to last year's portmanteau film V/H/S2. Instead he released The Raid 2 earlier this year and has announced a Raid 3, while an American Raid is reportedly in the works with little if any input from the original director. Evans may simply prefer to work in his adopted homeland, and it's not as if he hasn't made a name for himself worldwide from that base. Watch this space for a review of Raid 2 before the year is out; that should give some idea of whether Evans bears further watching.

JOURNEY TO THE WEST: CONQUERING THE DEMONS (2013)

If nothing is real, then everything is permitted. Thus reads the sutra of Buddhist comedy, as written by the sage Stephen Chow. His best-known text is Kung Fu Hustle, the global sensation of a decade ago. Journey to the West is only his second film as a director since then; Chow wasted some time developing a cross-cultural team-up with Seth Rogen, The Green Hornet, but the stars' styles apparently differed too strongly. One can presume that Chow's Hornet, which he would have directed and played Kato in, would have been a more fantastical film than the actual Rogen vehicle. Journey reminds us that nothing is too outlandish for Chow if it might be funny or simply amazing. It's his prequel, if not a full reboot, of China's great comic epic, showing how the monk Sanzang (Wen Zhang) put his team of reformed demons together. Chow, who gets a "Written, Directed and Produced by" credit while acknowledging several collaborators, shapes the material to Kung Fu Hustle's zero-to-hero-by-the-grace-of-Buddha formula. More so than Hustle, Journey will strike Americans as an uncomfortable blend of slapstick, sentimentality and death. But if the central message of Buddhism isn't exactly "life and death are a big joke," that's still close enough for Stephen Chow.

Chow keeps us off balance for the opening reels; viewers unfamiliar with his source material will be especially uncertain of who the actual protagonist is. A river village is menaced by a monster that attacks and devours a small girl's father. A demon hunter arrives to subdue the monster; throwing explosives into the river, he brings up a giant ray and declares victory. But a new arrival, Sanzang, warns that the ray is just an animal and the real demon is still in the water. He's proven right in the middle of the villagers' everyone-into-the-river celebration. With the aid of some brave souls and a very fat woman, Sanzang manages to get the demon stranded on land, on which it turns into a person. He then attempts to exorcise the evil spirit by singing from his demon-subduing textbook, the 300 Nursery Rhymes. The demon-man is merely confused by the performance until he's grabbed by yet another interloper and brusquely stuffed into an imprisoning sack. This newcomer is the forceful, tomboyish Miss Duan (Shu Qi), whom the villagers now acclaim as the real demon hunter while Sanzang, crestfallen, retreats to his home city to consult with his homeless master.

Demon hunting brings Sanzang and Duan to the same destination, a restaurant of the damned where the specialty is roast pig and the secret ingredient is PEOPLE!!! Together -- but Duan does most of the work with her incredible bracelet -- they defeat but fail to capture the master chef K.L. Hog, whose immobile smiley face hides the visage of a swine. Since a pig-demon is one of the companions in the Journey proper, we know we haven't seen the last of Mr. Hog.

Meanwhile, Duan develops an unlikely crush on Sanzang, given her contempt for his skills and his dedication to celibacy. She sets traps to make him prove his own love for her, but is woefully unskilled in the art of seduction; the only dance she knows is a set of fighting poses. Fortunately, she has a kid sister on her traveling support team who tries to teach her the softer ways. When that looks hopeless Sis resorts to the Obedience Charm, which will allow her to control Duan's movements for the crucial seduction. In a scene like something out of a Bob Hope or Danny Kaye picture, the charm ends up on Sanzang's back unbeknownst to Sis, who goes through the motions of seduction while a shirtless Sanzang is visited by two of Duan's male minions.  Fortunately, K.L. Hog, now in the form of a giant boar, attacks before things get too ugly.

 

Sanzang and Duan's gang are bailed out by three more rival demon hunters, and now we're given to understand that they're all superior to Duan. Hog is still on the loose, however, and Sanzang can only learn how to stop him from the famous Monkey King Sung Wukong (Huang Bo). Now in human form, Sung has spent the last 500 years imprisoned by Buddha for being an asshole. He tries repeatedly to trick Sanzang into removing the wards that confine him to his cave; in the meantime, with help from Duan, they capture Hog and stuff him in a magic bag. Since we cant call a movie Journey to the West without having the Monkey King run amok, Sanzang finally falls for one of his tricks and frees the demon. However, the other three demon hunters are right on the spot, each eager to smack down the rather runty ape-man. They all end up dead. Then Monkey King tears out all of Sanzang's copious hair, leaving him shorn like a true monk, before Duan steps in to rescue her beloved. Monkey King kills her, but not before she elicits the long-desired admission of love from Sanzang. Happily, his hair had nothing do with her attraction to him.

Comedy is different in China. Stephen Chow has just killed off his picture's love interest. Granted, in the actual Journey the monk has no love interest so you have to explain her absence, but still! But let me backtrack a little to further illustrate the different comic sensibility at play here. Back in the river village, you'll recall, a little girl was left fatherless. Chow has paid some attention to her, initially in a macabre way: her father had been playing in the water, pretending to scare her but making her cry until he surfaced to reassure her. She continues giggling while the monster actually attacks and kills her father. In an American movie that little girl might grow up to become an avenging demon-hunter in her own right. In Stephen Chow's movie the little girl is killed by the monster in the next attack, after a lot of slapstick effort to rescue her from the demon's clutches. Then her mother goes into the water to fight the demon -- and she gets killed. I don't think that Chow finds all this funny, but he clearly doesn't think that it's out of place in a comedy, either -- and that sets him apart from American movie comedy, despite all the influence generations of the stuff obviously has had on him. Going back to the present, he's killed the romantic lead. I expect that from a sword-and-sorcery picture where she might come back as an avenging valkyrie, but Chow has a different epiphany in mind.

Throughout the story, Duan has vented her contempt for Sanzang's reliance on the 300 Nursery Rhymes, at one point tearing his precious tome into shreds. Later, she contritely returns the book to him, explaining that she had taken three days to reassemble it, but warning that, since "I don't read so well" it might not really be intact. After her death, the grieving Sanzang turns to her re-edited 300 Nursery Rhymes. By a miracle, the barely-literate Duan had reassembled the book into the Buddha Sutra that had subdued the Monkey King 500 years earlier. Reciting from the sutra, Sanzang becomes invulnerable to the Monkey's attacks. Better still, he summons Buddha himself. In a climax that amplifies the hero's enlightened re-entry from space in Kung Fu Hustle, Buddha appears like a starchild off-planet to lay the smack down on Sung Wukong, who thinks he can win because he's wrecked a mountain in the Buddha's shape. Sung transforms into a giant gorilla to grapple with his old enemy, but you haven't seen a Buddha Palm until you see it here. It keeps coming and coming until you realize that Monkey King isn't even equal to a cell of the Enlightened One. Whatever you may think of his religion, this Buddha kicks ass without even trying. All through the picture we've encountered warriors and demons, each tougher or more powerful than the last, but they're all nothing compared to Buddha. I don't know how seriously Stephen Chow actually takes Buddhism in real life, but his two martial-arts fantasies certainly do proselytize for Buddha quite forcefully. And for what it's worth, Buddhism reconciles Sanzang both to losing the love of his life and to his mission to come, though it may be a concession to modern sensibilities that the hero has to experience romantic love, however briefly, before he can renounce it.

To American eyes it may seem as if tragedy and comedy clash too often in Journey to the West, but it's arguably wrong to call it tragedy when people simply are killed, or even when characters in whom we've been invited to invest emotional interest are killed. If we call it a moment of pathos when Duan dies we come closer to an older tradition of American comedy, but even then the silent clowns would never let their idolized females die for pathos' sake. There is pathos, I suppose, when Sanzang sees a shimmering golden vision of Duan at the end of the picture, but overall Chow's attitude toward killing characters is like Chuck Jones killing Bugs Bunny in What's Opera, Doc? What did you expect, given the subject matter? The truth is, Journey to the West is more like cartoons than anything else. Astounding violence co-exists with utter clownishness, from the fat woman landing on a plank to send the river demon flying through the air to the squeaky-toy sound effect when the heroes punch out K.L. Hog's minions to the giant Monty Python foot of one of the demon hunters. Cartoons and comedy movies come from a burlesque tradition that allowed trauma to be exaggerated into comedy on the common recognition that none of it is real. It may not be exaggerating too much to suggest that Buddhism's recognition of the transience of all things and the distance it establishes from emotional attachment help explain the affinity of Asian martial-arts cinema for American slapstick comedy, as exemplified by Jackie Chan and, on a more philosophical level, by Stephen Chow. Still, none of this makes Journey to the West a great or even very good film. The character of Duan, while played to the hilt by Shu Qi, never really coheres, and the chemistry Chow insists on between her and Sanzang isn't really there, and some of the demon hunters have no real personality beyond their gimmicks. Despite its weaknesses in characterization and plotting, Chow's Journey is still a wildly imaginative spectacle that has the virtue, increasingly rare in American spectacle, of really looking and feeling different from everything else. For all its faults, vive la difference!

DVR Diary: THE CHINESE BOXER (1970)

Jimmy Wang Yu is probably the most underrated master of martial arts cinema in proportion to his contributions to the genre. Personal problems and business conflicts have kept him from being recognized as a peer to Bruce Lee, though at age 70 Wang Yu appears to be enjoying a late-career renaissance, having received Best Actor nominations for his latest film, Soul. He beat Lee to the punch, so to speak, in several respects. The Chinese Boxer, for instance, was Wang Yu's debut as writer-director as well as star, setting him on a course that led to the epic Beach of the War Gods and the cult milestone Master of the Flying Guillotine. More importantly, Chinese Boxer is credited with establishing the kung fu film -- though the magic words are never used in the English dub shown on the El Rey channel -- as something distinct from the weapons-oriented wuxia pictures Wang Yu had starred in since his breakthrough in One-Armed Swordsman. A sense of novelty pervades the project, as for the benefit of a Chinese audience the auteur has a doomed teacher explain what Chinese boxing is -- and, for that matter, what karate is. Wang Yu was thus self-consciously blazing a new trail, but the funny thing is, while he's credited with practically inventing a new style of movie, he may have thought he was making a western.

There's no doubt that he was influenced by westerns. He stages one fight, his own character with throwing knives in his shirt pocket against a shuriken-tossing Japanese, exactly in the manner of a gunfight in the middle of a street, down to his "holstering" of his knives as a challenge to his enemy's "fast draw" with the throwing stars. Chinese Boxer is also thematically reminiscent of westerns. Wang Yu's character becomes a sort of town tamer, driving evil gamblers from his home. The initial villain is a crooked Chinese fighter (Chao Hsiung) who wants to destroy the local martial-arts school so he can make the town wide-open for gambling. The linkage between martial arts and gambling -- it isn't entirely clear whether our hero's master forbids gambling in town or controls it himself -- puts me in mind of Wyatt Earp, though who exactly the Earp figure is in Chinese Boxer depends on what you think of Earp. In any event, the master deals with Diao Erh fairly easily, but makes the mistake of letting him limp away to fight another day. Instead, he calls in a contingent of Japanese fighters -- Diao Erh is a karate enthusiast himself -- led by the glowering Kitashima (Lo Lieh). Establishing a Wang Yu motif we'll see again in Master of the Flying Guillotine, Kitashima demonstrates his ferocity by launching himself through the roof of a building, though in this early case he only goes partway through. He wants to stay inside to watch his minions kill one of the master's students who was spying on Diao Erh. Kitashima has a habit of demonstrating his ferocity and then ordering a minion to fight for him. But when it counts, Kitashima is a beast, killing the old master in a mid-air collision, kicking him through a wall. That climaxes a massacre of the old school, during which Wang Yu himself is clobbered and taken out early. We know he's not dead, however, because we don't see him cough up blood; our auteur presumably gets credit for establishing this method to sell death by punch.

Writer-director Wang Yu does more to embed his fight story in a social setting than many subsequent kung fu filmmakers. Before the action begins, he treats us to slices of life in his little town to illustrate its traditional normalcy. After the master's school is destroyed, he shows how Diao Erh and Kitashima have turned it into a Pottersville of vice. While our hero recuperates, we get a tragic tale of a man whose lucky night turns sour when the casino management accuses him of cheating. The man's wife pleads for his life and gets raped for her trouble. In his sickbed, our hero learns that husband and wife have killed themselves from shame. Gamblers as the serpents in Eden are a familiar motif in U.S. westerns, but I suppose Wang Yu is also protesting against perceived Japanese economic and cultural hegemony over Asia, their revenge for losing the war. That this film is Nippophobic goes without saying, from the master's condemnation of karate as inherently aggressive and destructive to the identification of Japanese with social or cultural corruption.

This news about the suicidal couple is the last straw for our hero, who finally rises from his sickbed to train for revenge. For the first time, presumably, we get the training montage characteristic of kung fu cinema, as our man toughens his fists and forearms in a cauldron of iron filings and jogs and jumps with iron weights on his legs. Ready at last, he adopts a costume, going into battle wearing a surgical mask and oven mitts. Japanese are the disease, and he's the cure.

As a director, Wang Yu falls somewhere between the visual poetry of King Hu and the kinetic efficiency of Chang Cheh. He indulges in self-consciously artistic compositions that have nothing to do with fight choreography. He shoots from the ceiling as the master lectures his seated students about comparative martial arts, because it's a nice-looking shot. He establishes the moral delirium of gambling by opening the casino scene with the action as seen and distorted in a high mirror. Wang Yu was an ambitious director who readily acknowledges stylistic and genre influences while striving to film fighting in exciting new ways. He's fond of long horizontal tracking shots with extended group choreography. He uses physical destruction as punctuation, whether the Japanese are punching holes in the school walls or Wang Yu and Lo Lieh are breaking trees in the final fight in a wintry forest. And there's the coughing up of blood, of course. He also has the advantage of a charismatic hero in himself and a classic villain in Lo Lieh -- that man's face was a national cultural treasure. As an overall auteur, circumstances kept Wang Yu from being as prolific as Chang Cheh or as popular as Bruce Lee. But there's something persistently unorthodox in his direction that keeps his work fresh, based on the few films of his I've seen. Despite his reputed innovations he was eclipsed by many other figures, but when all is said and done, given his multiple skills, Jimmy Wang Yu may well go down as the greatest creative talent in kung fu cinema.