SWORDSMAN II (1992)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

It's a minor puzzle to me that the 1990 Swordsman is so mediocre next to its sequel. They used the same characters (though barely any of the same actors) and the same source material. Two of the credited directors for S2, Tsui Hark and Ching Sui-Ting, had forged major pathways for Hong Kong cinema of the late eighties, particularly with the stylish, wonder-filled CHINESE GHOST STORY trilogy. I mentioned that the 1990 film had some mixed backstage history, in that original director King Hu departed the project, but why weren't Hark and Ching able to pull the 1990 film together? 

Whatever the reasons for the first film's failures, S2 finds an admirable way to provide some dramatic compass for the movie, even though this movie like S1 still focuses upon the often-confusing interplay between various kung-fu clans. During the Ming dynasty the generals of a Japanese militia, expelled from their own country, land in China and conspire to usurp the rule of the Emperor. These invaders, at least some of whom are ninjas, join forces with a kung-fu clan seen in the first film, the Sun Moon Clan. This alliance is made possible when the "good" masters of the Clan, one of whom is Ren Yingying (Rosamund Kwan), get expelled by a new master, Invincible Dawn (Brigitte Lin). Though Dawn is male and speaks with a deep voice, he underwent one of those many mystical transformations possible in wuxia movies, becoming female in terms of outward appearance-- though only his courtiers know his true nature. 

After this conspiracy is detailed, the script focuses upon the same two main characters of the first film, Ling (Jet Li) and Kiddo (Michelle Reis). Though both are still young albeit skilled members of the Hua sect, they're thinking about ditching the constant strife of the martial arts world. Kiddo, secretly in love with Ling, wishes that he could see her as a woman, though I have no idea why she constantly runs around in men's attire in the first place. Ling for his part has some romantic attachment to the aforementioned Ren. I confess I barely remember Ren from the first film, but she's a more interesting character this time, having some fun badinage with her serving-woman Blue Phoenix (Fennie Yuen, returning from the 1990 film). 

The assault of Dawn's forces on Ren's Sun Moon court provides one of the film's most memorable scenes, as ninjas ride into battle on their own flying nunchakus and toss scorpions at the guardians, who in turn toss snakes back at the invaders. Ren has to flee. Slightly later, Ling and Kiddo show up at the Hua pavilion and almost get into a fatal fight with their own young colleagues. Once they recognize one another, the martial artists-- all of whom plan to foreswear the martial life-- nevertheless enjoy their old camaraderie, though Kiddo finds herself not embracing being "one of the boys" so much. The youths all get a false message that Ren is being held by Dawn's forces, so they attempt to rescue her, only to get directed to the real location of the exiled Sun Moon luminaries. 

Somewhat later Ling makes a solo assault on Dawn's stronghold, but when he meets the "master," he mistakes him for a female prisoner and tries to shield Dawn from his own guards. Ling apparently falls for Dawn, who remains silent to conceal her deep voice. (Later the evil martial master learns how to modulate his voice into a feminine register, allowing Brigitte Lin to use her own speech.) Later, during a fractious encounter with Woxing, the father of Ren-- who's secretly colluding with Dawn-- Ling refuses to marry Ren, clearly breaking her heart (but giving Kiddo new hope).

The final battle shows the original Sun Moon acolytes and their Hua allies taking on Dawn's forces, and this results in Dawn's apparent death (though Lin returns as the character in the final sequel). In a nice if acrimonious scene between Ling and Woxing, Woxing mocks the younger man's naivete, saying it's impossible to really leave the martial world. "As long as there are people, there will be grievances. Where there are grievances, there is the martial arts world." I found that such realistic assessments of the Nature of Man acted as a pleasing counterpoint to the many wild wuxia wonders--- killing opponents with thrown needles, uprooting trees when opponents hide inside them. Additionally, though often I think that "queer theory" proponents overstate the significance of male characters masquerading as women, or even transforming magically into women, here t Ahe screenwriters might've had some "genderfluid" ideas going on in their conception of Dawn, though it should be noted that he is still an unregenerate villain as a woman.  At the end of the film, Ling and Kiddo depart the Sun Moon Sect and don't return for the sequel. This may imply that Kiddo's constancy may finally be reciprocated once they leave behind the world of senseless strife.                   

SWORDSMAN (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I've seen reviews touting this 1990 Tsui Hark film as starting Hong Kong's wuxia craze of the 1990s. Historically, this may well be true; maybe it's the first expensive film of the period to focus on the battles of wuxia practitioners, who can wreak all sorts of magical phenomena with their kung fu. But for me SWORDSMAN is all but indistinguishable from a dozen other chopsockies in which martial masters show off incredible powers-- often in stories that throw far too many characters at the audience.

 In addition, SWORDSMAN is mostly about two or more clans fighting over a prized item: one of those tomes of martial lore with which the possessor can Take Over the Kung Fu World. This unoriginal plot-setup is not that much of a deficit, but to get past that predictability, a kung-fu film needs one or more likable protagonists, with whom to identify even when one can't keep track of all the rest of the cast.

Producer Hark chose to adapt a work by popular novelist Louis Cha, and his original director of choice was the celebrated King Hu, though Hu departed the project after some time and SWORDSMAN had to be finished up by other hands. The change in creative administrators may be responsible for the sponginess of the two main characters, though it might also be a factor stemming from the original novel. Though I'm unlikely to ever read a Cha novel even in translation, I can form some tentative conclusions based on my experience of his works in movies-- such as DRAGON CHRONICLES. Like SWORDSMAN, CHRONICLES offered a lot of wild FX, but barely any characters worth identifying with.

After the Big Book of Kung Fu is stolen from the emperor's library, two young kung-fu students of a particular school travel to meet with a noble named Lam, master of a divergent school. Ling (Sam Hui, apparently best known as a comedy actor) and Kiddo (Michelle Reis, a female masquerading as a young man) eventually find their emissary-duties compromised when Lam involves them in caring for the missing tome. Okay-- but why is Lam's theft of the volume justified, and why do Ling and Kiddo feel honor-bound to help him keep hold of stolen merchandise? Later the duo is attacked by two distinct killers, one sent by the emperor and one from their own school. What greater good do Ling and Kiddo serve by keeping hold of the book for the betterment of Lam's school?

A lot of Chinese kung-fu movies have come up with good takes on the schtick of a female masquerading as a male in the company of men, but SWORDSMAN seems routine at every pass. Even a scene in which Kiddo is bathing and Ling refuses to get out of the room seemed tedious. Later, another female, Blue Phoenix (Fennie Yuen) seems to be competing for Ling's interest, but this too doesn't seem to get started-- though Phoenix has the most noteworthy wuxia stunt, somehow projecting snakes out of her gown-sleeves. The various kung-fu magicks lacked panache, and I've frankly seen more interesting effects in much cheaper chopsockies. 

I saw this over 20 years ago and remembered nothing about it, but I must admit that the same is true of the purportedly superior sequel SWORDMAN II, which used the same characters but kept almost none of the actors from the original film.       

DEADFUL MELODY (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I think the above screenshot might be Carina Lau, but she has annoyingly little representation online for this movie. That's a shame because, although Yuen Baio and Brigitte Lin are the leads in the ungrammatically-named DEADFUL MELODY, Lau is the only performer worth watching.

MELODY is a variation on a favorite trope of kung-fu films: that of having a bunch of clans pursuing some secret technique, usually recoded on a scroll or something similar. MELODY is the only time known to me when the clans are after a super-weapon: a magical lyre which, when played correctly, can cause its victims to explode. Moreover, they only explode after a lapse of time, like the fabled "dim mak" touch. Having such a weapon doesn't sound so much like the sort of thing kung-fu clans specialize in, but that's the story.

We first see the film's diva Brigitte Lin, later given the name "Snow," as a child. Her family is attacked by a gang of clans, all wanting the lyre. Young Snow's father and mother are definitely killed, though her brother's death is more apparent than real. Young Snow tries to keep the lyre from the thieves but falls with it off a cliff, thus frustrating the evil clan members. 

Naturally, Snow and the lyre both survive. Somehow in adulthood she becomes phenomenally rich and a kung-fu expert, though apparently, she confides in no one. Snow wants to draw out the kung-fu killers and forms a plan to do so. She engages a security company to protect the lyre when she sends it overland to another recipient. As it happens, the only available guard for the caravan is Lui Lun (Yuen), and though he does possess some martial skills, he's not capable of fending off the clan-masters. However, Snow shadows the caravan and picks off the masters when they attack.

Unfortunately, the wire-fu used in MELODY is mediocre at best, and so the film lacks the dazzling qualities of other wuxia films of the period. Lin just essays her usual severe persona, while Yuen does his usual easygoing character, except when his father is killed because of Snow's manipulations. However, Lun's vengeance is forestalled when Snow finds out, and reveals, that Lun is the brother she thought she lost, who was raised by the man Lun thought his real father. All of these Dickensian revelations are bland and no more involving than the two main characters.

As stated, MELODY's one bright spot is Carina Lau's character Tam. Tam is the saucy student of one of the masters-- the only master who's more genial than the really villainous guys, though I would think he's still guilty of the murders of Snow's parents. Tam tries to steal the lyre from Lun but her ambition outpaces her abilities and he defeats her easily. In the course of their interaction, Tam falls for Lun, though it's never clear if Lun feel anything for her. MELODY might have been a little better had Lun and Tam hooked up at the end, if only because it would have taken the emphasis off the dud brother-sister revelations. Recent news asserts that there may be a remake of the film, but for myself I'd like to see almost any old chopsocky get an update rather than this nothingburger.                 

THE MAGIC CRYSTAL (1986)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Writer/director/actor Wong Jing has a rep for crazy kung-fu comedies, but as I've said only four of his 1990s outings, I can't confirm that, aside from saying that the 1993 CITY HUNTER is really stupid. But by contrast, this 1986 chopsocky is easy to follow. It's pedestrian, but it's not any more incomprehensible than a lot of other HK adventure-comedies.

Andy Lau (playing a trouble shooter named Andy) is contacted by a friend who claims to have found an alien artifact. Andy and his goofy sidekick Snooker (played by director Jing) go to meet the friend in Greece, but the guy is captured and interrogated by the KGB (led by badass Richard Norton). The artifact, a green rock, falls into the hands of Andy's young nephew Pin Pin, son of another of Andy's friends, and soon Pin Pin learns that there's an alien intelligence inside the stone, capable of controlling (some) minds and even wreaking miracles, like causing Snooker's hands and feet to become interchanged.

Meanwhile, two Interpol agents-- one a non-entity, the other played by Cynthia Rothrock-- are also after the rock, and they try to persuade Andy to help them locate it. The various fights between the stars (Lau and Rothrock), the Russians led by Norton, and a few lesser combatants (Lau's sword-wielding sister, played by Mei-Mei Wong) are the real attraction here. None of the rinky-dinky SF elements in CRYSTAL are half as wonder-inspiring as the speed with which actors Norton and Rothrock move to pull off their stunts.

CRYSTAL is a little funnier than the average HK comedy and certainly scores in the fighting department, and even though it's low-mythicity it makes a pleasant enough confection. 

   

THE KNIGHT OF SHADOWS (2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

Considering how awful some of Jackie Chan's 21st-century productions have been, whether from the East or the West, KNIGHT OF SHADOWS is certainly way ahead of any of those embarrassments. Though it's almost entirely formulaic, at least there's some sense of what the formula is supposed to be.   

We're in medieval China, probably around the 17th century, since Chan's character Pu Songling is based on a famous storyteller of that era. The author's stories, particularly the supernatural ones, were often adapted in China, most famously in the original CHINESE GHOST STORY movie. But this fictionalized version-- I'll call him "Pu" for short-- isn't content to write about the supernatural. He also travels from town to town, exorcising demons whenever he comes across them. Pu's principal weapon is the "Yin-Yang brush," a calligraphy-brush with which he can sketch mystic patterns that in turn banish demons. He also travels with three goofy CGI demons, and the fact that one demon is named "Farty" aptly describes the level of humor the film's shooting for. This accords with Chan playing Pu as a jolly bumpkin, seemingly more concerned with selling his story-pamphlets in every town to which he travels. He's not a dedicated demon-hunter but just fights the critters wherever he happens across them.    

In one town, Pu gets mixed up in with a demon that rips off some precious jewels, but that's just an excuse to have him encounter a comic foil, a naive young village cop (Lin Bohong) who eventually becomes Pu's apprentice, little as Pu wants one. However, the more crucial support-character is another demon-hunter, Yan (Ethan Juan). Yan is on the trail of a pair of female demons, Xiaoqian (Elane Zhong) and Jin (Lin Peng). These two demons feed on human souls by promising immortality to young women and then imprisoning them in a painting for eternity. Yan has had a romantic relationship with Xiaoqian that one source claims is derived from the same story that gave rise to CHINESE GHOST STORY. However, KNIGHT adds some confusing business that I don't think would've occurred to a 17th-century teller of tales: that Yan apparently used to be a demon and Xiaoqian used to be a human. These needless complications, happily, don't distract from the strong melodrama of the Yan-Xiaoqian love scenes, which are as ripely melodramatic as anything in CHINESE GHOST STORY.

Between the heavy panting of the romance scenes and the wacky comedy of the funny demon hunters, KNIGHT forces viewers to put up with a lot of tonal shifts. The script compensates with a very episodic structure, making those shifts fairly tolerable. Not much of the comedy works, except for a bravura sequence with Pu in a room full of mirrors. Not only can Demoness Jin strike at Pu through the mirror-surfaces, slapping or choking, she also cuts him off at the waist, literally, so that Pu's two halves run around the room doing silly things. Given that sixty-something Chan can't possibly ever duplicate the martial feats for which he became famous, it's fun to see him try to come up with wild stunts via CGI. KNIGHT is never in the least profound, but it's highly colorful and lively, and that makes it worth a look.

   

            

CYBER TRACKER (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I've occasionally appreciated the better formula-flicks from the defunct straight-to-video studio PM Entertainment. However, this brain-dead effort, despite starring what might be PM's most bankable star, proves thoroughly routine.   

Don Wilson plays Eric Phillips, a secret service agent assigned to protect government bigwigs, lives in a near-future Earth that looks almost like regular Earth: the presence of cyber-trackers. These emotionless automatons serve roughly the same purpose as the judges in the British JUDGE DREDD comic: once assigned to overtake sentenced criminals, they immediately execute them with arm-guns. The script shows zero interest in how this sociological state of affairs came about, and we never see more than one cyber-tracker at a time. always played by the same hulking actor, Jim Maniaci.

Though Eric's devoted to his job, he's lost a wife who didn't like the danger he lived with, and an obnoxious fellow agent constantly seeks to undercut Eric's authority. (Since the other agent is played by Richard Norton, fans know there will eventually be a match between Norton and Wilson, though the script makes viewers wait until the bitter end for the fight.) However, Eric's biggest problem is that he won't help the governor he's guarding with some illegal project he's got going with Cybercore, the company that makes the trackers. So the villains frame Eric for murder and send a tracker to kill him. Eric is then conveniently enlisted by a rebel group seeking to eliminate Cybercore's influence over the government, and guess what, the head of the rebels is a hot young babe named Connie (Stacie Foster).         

Some of the PM releases are good in terms of mounting decent if unremarkable action-scenes, but TRACKER's many scenes of gunfire and car chases are tedious in the extreme, and the one big kung-fu fight at the end is just fair. The Connie character can't fight but she's reasonably cast as a reporter allied to a rebel group in order to seek justice, though the script, having set up a new romance with her for Eric, doesn't develop that subplot. The movie's only original touch is a concluding quote from Ayn Rand.        

TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE (1977)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Otherwise known as JACKIE CHAN'S HAMLET! Okay, I'm the only one who calls TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE by that name but given that this obscure Taiwanese flick predates Jackie's jolly image, I could justify the name just on the basis that this has to be Chan's grimmest, most morose role up to this point in his career.

However, one of INTRIGUE's scenes made me think of the key HAMLET scene in which the hero renounces Ophelia, possibly (as some critics speculate) after he's made her pregnant. In INTRIGUE, young nobleman Shao (Chan) meets with Qian (Yu Ling-long), a maid in his father's court, and tells her to take a hike, despite knowing that she has a bun in the oven. Not too much later, he bursts into the court, telling all of the guests celebrating his father's birthday to get lost too. The guests leave, and Father Lei yells at Shao. Shao says he did it all to keep innocents out of harm's way, and he removes an item from his tunic: a dismembered hand with the image of a human-headed bee drawn upon it. Shao doesn't say how he came by this curious oracle, but he claims it's the calling-card of a gang of kung-fu bandits, the Killer Bees, whom Lord Lei attempted to wipe out. While the lord is conferring with his son, wife, and retainers about the incipient attack, four guests return to the court-- only to drop dead. A strange one-handed man shows up (maybe a cutesy reference to Jimmy Wang Yu's One-Armed Swordsman?) and demands the return of his hand. Shao flings the dead hand to the probably dead man and the latter bounds away.

Then the attack by the Killer Bees begins in earnest. Armed men appear on the estate-walls, and into the courtyard five coffins appear. The coffin lids shoot off, and up spring the assault's leader and four cohorts, all attired in flower-masks, as if seeking to conflate death and fertility. The leader is Ting Tan-yen (Hsu Feng), a beautiful woman wearing a half-mask over her lower face, and after swearing vengeance, she engages Lord Lei in sword-combat. A melee breaks out, but the Lei family is overmatched. Ting kills the hero's mother and father and easily beats down Shao's weak nobleman-fu. However, he manages to get a sword to Ting's throat. She invites Shao to kill her but only after she shows him the facial scar beneath her mask, a wound she got from Shao's father when she was still a child. Doubt, the curse of the Melancholy Dane, causes Shao to hesitate, and Ting knocks him out.

When he awakes, he sees Ting from behind and thinks it's his lost love Qian. Ting tells Shao that she spared his life so that he'd suffer as she suffered the loss of her family. Shao can do nothing but go looking for the woman he spurned, even for reasons he thought beneficent.

To be sure, Shao wasn't completely stupid about the risks of chasing off his pregnant mistress; he mentioned to his father that he sent a friend named Jin to look after Qian. Jin does show up just as bandits attack Qian, and he kicks their asses before taking Qian to his house. However, Jin doesn't seem to know why Shao disavowed his mistress. Qian wants to flee the general area and Jin obliges her, so that when Shao comes looking, no one's to home.

A disconsolate Shao stays at Jin's house. Ting shows up, twisting the knife by telling Shao his friend's gone off with his lover. Then she calls Shao a "beast," which just so happens to be what Qian called Shao when he gave her the kiss-off. Shao hallucinates that Ting is Qian, embraces her, and summarily beds her. It's not clear if Ting is aware he's mistaken her for someone else, though there's no question she could've stopped Shao if she'd wanted to. After they've had sex and Shao's passed out, he mumbles Qian's name and Ting runs off, jealous as hell. (I admit Hamlet didn't do quite this much bed-hopping, though a fellow named Freud claimed that he had a certain ambivalence about his mama.) 

Then Shao pays the price for a grudge against Jin, as three paid assassins break in on him. He fights them and he kills one, but the other two knock him out. Fourth Dragon, an older noble, shows up and tells his assassin-employees that they assaulted the wrong man. He pays them off but when they want to murder the unconscious Shao, Fourth Dragon drives them off. He has Shao brought to his home, apologizes, and tells Shao that Jin ripped off the cargo that Fourth Dragon's guard-escorts were protecting. Slightly later, Ting shows up again-- "I am your shadow," she mocks the anguished hero-- and though she won't tell Shao where Jin and Qian are, she tasks him with not even having the filial piety to bury his slain parents. Further, she says, they were buried by none other than his recent benefactor, Fourth Dragon. Shao, unable to find his lost love, sublimates his desires by pledging loyalty to a "second father," joining the Dragon's guards. Does Fourth Dragon take the place of Lord Lei, the father whose virtue became suspect? The clan of the assassins attacks the guardians, and Shao leads the fight against them, calling himself "Fifth Dragon." But the assassins really start losing when Ting Tan-yen joins the battle, without explaining why she interceded. She leaves Shao in the care of Fourth Dragon for the time being but later persuades him to let her take Shao to her own domicile. 

On top of all these sturm-and-drang incidents-- Shao finding a new father to replace the dead one, or having his life preserved by the woman who killed both parents-- Fourth Dragon meets the governor, to whom his life is forfeit for losing a precious cargo-- and it's none other than the robber Jin, who is ALSO the head of the assassin-clan. Basically, everything Jin has done has been to advance his clan's power in the region, and he even takes credit for eliminating the Lei family. This may have been an overreach on the author's part, since Jin doesn't seem affiliated with the Killer Bees, who aren't mentioned or seen again after the opening fight. Jin fights and kills both Fourth Dragon and his aide, and then proceeds to his estate, where he uses honeyed words to persuade Qian to marry him. She agrees, wanting to protect her child and grieving because she's been told Shao is dead. 

Now, thus far INTRIGUE hasn't had anything like Hamlet's ghostly father, or even the Devil whom Hamlet half-suspects of having sent the paternal apparition. However, there is a slight sense of passing into another world when Shao is taken to Ting's estate. Ting heals Shao but won't let him leave if he can't beat her in kung fu. He practices continually, but he's unable to up his game. He challenges her anyway, and she punishes him in various ways, which reminded me of the ordeals heroes would undergo from goddesses. (Admittedly the Classical deities didn't make their acolytes swallow hot coals or suffer having their faces burned). Finally, in contrast to the majority of chopsockies, Ting realizes Shao can't equal her. She feeds him a drink mixed with her own blood, and this empowers him so that he can now destroy Jin and save Qian, even though Ting's implicitly condemned to a loveless existence.

I admit that Shao's quest for vengeance isn't responsible for the deaths of almost all of the principal characters, as Hamlet's quest causes the fall of the Danish court. However, a few times the English translation criticizes Shao's inability to tell good from bad, which is closer to Hamlet than most martial-arts heroes ever come. Shao's overly trusting friendship with Jin makes it possible for the evil plotter to end the lives of the Fourth Dragon family, and (maybe indirectly) those of the Lei Family too. It is a major error when Ting's Killer Bee allies just disappear. In a plot-sense Jin's assassin cult more or less takes the place of the recrudescent bandits, even though Ting clearly does not connect the two in any way when she cuts a bloody swathe through the assassins to protect Shao. While INTRIGUE was no more than a bump in the road of Jackie Chan's ascension to international success, it does deserve to be better known as one of the few kung-fu films to possess some psychological depth. I haven't seen all the films in Hsu Feng's repertoire, but I doubt any other role she played came close to that of the tormented Ting Tan-Yen.   

   

                 

THE KILLER METEORS (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

I don't exactly why I liked KILLER METEORS even in a minor way. It's certainly not because the movie is anyone's favorite Jackie Chan film, for although it received an early American video release thanks to the Chan fandom, the Chan-man occupies a supporting role in METEORS. This is primarily a Jimmy Wang Yu chopsocky, and I can't describe it better than a reviewer who said it was a movie made when Wang Yu was on the downside of his popularity and Chan was about to hit his stride. To be sure, at this point Chan had not yet found his metier, and METEORS is one of the few movies where Jolly Jackie plays a complete villain.

In many previous reviews I've assailed various HK movies for doing a bad job of melding the chopsocky genre with that of the murder-mystery. My most frequent criticism is that the mystery-choppers, at least as they appear in their English versions, are frequently sloppy, tossing in new characters at random and not providing strong motives for the principals. METEORS, though, was comparatively restrained in terms of introducing the main characters and sticking with them, so even if not every motive completely tracked, at least I could keep track of who was who.

Both Wang Yu and Chan plan renowned martial arts masters. Mei, the former's character, seems to be a roaming crusader, and he's nicknamed "Killer Meteors" because he possesses some strange weapon of that same name, though no one knows what the weapon  is because its victims are always destroyed. Hua, Chan's character, seems to be a nobleman in exile, living with a small entourage. When Mei answers Hua's summons to his home, Hua explains that his wife Lady Tempest (Lee Si-Si) fed him a slow-acting poison for some offense. Hua can't penetrate his wife's formidable defenses, consisting largely of four adepts with special powers, like hurling darts or wielding magical magnetism, so Hua hires Mei to steal the antidote from Lady Tempest. Hua accepts the task, and one of the first things he does to enter the Tempest court is to persuade one of her court-women, Lady Phoenix (Lily Lu-yi), to pretend that he's one of her slaves. At the same time, Mei also has another girl in his life, one Fung (Yu Ling-lung), and though there's no explicit sex here. Fung does visit Mei in jail once and apparently gives up her womanhood to him.

In addition to various sockings and choppings, there are also assorted crosses and double crosses, which I won't try to recapitulate. One IMDB review asserts that the screenplay by one Gu Long was adapted from the writer's own wuxia novel, and if so, I'd venture this is why the plot seemed to hang together reasonably well, even if I didn't buy every motive. The ending seems to set up a confrontation between Fung and Phoenix, the two rivals for Mei's love, but they just disappear for a time and then Phoenix shows up to unite with Mei, perhaps suggesting that Fung met some unpleasant fate. Chan and Wang Yu fight twice, but neither battle is exceptional given their stature in the world of martial movies. The revelation of the "killer meteors'" nature leads me to call this movie a magical-era fantasy, though it's much less evocative than one of Lo Wei's previous works in that vein, 1971's VENGEANCE OF A SNOW GIRL-- which I also esteem far above the two mundane Bruce Lee films Wei made around the same time. I don't know how many times Lo Wei might have crossed paths with Gu Long, except that after they made this shot-in-Korea Taiwanese cheapie, they again collaborated on a second kung-film in Korea as well, TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE, which had Chan as the sole star and Yu Ling-lung, again in a support-role.

THE DRAGON LIVES AGAIN (1977)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I'd heard bits and pieces about this low-budget Hong Kong comedy, but streaming made it possible to see all the craziness in the comfort of my home. DRAGON-- also circulated under the title DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU (which title Marvel Comics borrowed for their kung fu magazine) -- isn't a great comedy. But it's definitely a rara avis, given that most Asian chopsockies assiduously avoided references not only to American icons of pop culture but to popular Asian icons as well. I'm sure the only reason director/co-writer Chi Lo bucked the trend was because he almost certainly had no legal permission to use any of these franchise-characters. He was probably counting on just getting his wacky Brucesploitation film shown in HK cinemas for a few weeks, making a little money without inciting foreign retaliation, and closing up shop. Though I don't recognize any of the other movies in Chi Lo's repertoire, it doesn't seem like he ever attempted this brass-balled crossover dementia again.

Purely as an exercise in lunacy, I was won over by the inventiveness of the credit sequence alone. Bruce Lee (played by Bruce Leung) squares off against James Bond, but they agree not to fight after all, possibly because Bond had his share of HK fans. Bruce fights some guys in skeleton costumes, and a taller guy fights them too while the credits play a few strains from THE GODFATHER song "Speak Softly Love." Zatoichi duels Bruce but Bruce tickles the hostility out of the blind masseuse. Kato humiliates the Man with No Name. Bruce is attacked by the Western Dracula and an Asian guy later called The Exorcist, and he bests both of them. Then the sequence ends after Bruce fights a red-robed fellow and more skeleton guys.

Then the "story" begins in Hades, where the underworld's lord, Judge Pao, prepares to judge the recently deceased Bruce Lee. However, the dead body of Bruce appears to get a boner. Hey, surprise, it's just the nunchucks in his pocket! Then Bruce springs back to life and promptly insults the king before his assembled court. Pao shows off his power by shaking a pillar that can cause earthquakes, and Bruce more or less slows his roll.

Next Bruce shows up in what I assume is an underworld restaurant, where he has minor encounters with Popeye, Kwai Chang Caine, and Zatoichi. Bruce pisses off Zatoichi, who seeks revenge by bringing in his criminal allies: James Bond, the Man with No Name (called "Clint Eastwood"), and those skeleton-costumed guys from the credit sequence. Bruce kicks a lot of asses but suddenly loses his strength. There's a second-long scene in which he's being encircled by beautiful women in filmy gowns like the hot maidens from Pao's court, and as Bruce collapses Clint Eastwood kicks him when he's down. Injured Bruce is taken in by the kindly owner of the inn, also a doctor.

  Bruce explains (sort of) to Doctor Wa To and his daughters that he has an "Achilles Heel" from having played around too much in life, and he even mentions the real-life wife of Real Bruce Lee, also the mother of actors Brandon and Shannon Lee. While the audience tries to figure out what this confession of impropriety has to do with anything, the scene shifts to the underworld haunt of the bad spirits, including those already mentioned plus Dracula, The Godfather (who resembles no one from THE GODFATHER), the Exorcist (who resembles no one from THE EXORCIST), and the sex-nymphet Emmanuelle. They're all planning to overthrow Judge Pao, and they reference using their ally Dracula and his "zombies."  

 Some thugs randomly attack Bruce, but he fends them off with the help of the One-Armed Swordsman, who doesn't have a sword this time. Bruce, One Arm, Popeye and Caine put on a show to draw business to Bruce's new gymnasium. While that's going on, some of the hot ladies in Pao's court sit around bathing and showing off their tits while they fantasize about Bruce's attainments, Another shift, and there's a brief brawl when Popeye and Caine beat up some underworld cops. Zatoichi challenges Bruce to a battle, and they adjourn to a quarry, where they have one of the movie's few decent fights (albeit still comical in nature, not even counting Bruce "labeling" his moves after the films he made in life). 

The bad spirits send Emmanuelle to seduce the Bruce, but for some unknown reason he's able to throw off his tendency towards concupiscence, so he rejects her. The Godfather and his gang offer Bruce a place in their conspiracy, and he rejects them too. Pao's wife the Queen and her servant-girl invade Bruce's quarters and knock out Wa To's daughter Sue Man, who clearly has a crush on Bruce though he doesn't show any feelings toward her. One of the spirit-girls takes Sue Man's form but he isn't fooled her come-on. The queen and her servant fight over Bruce and use a magical potion, intended to stoke Bruce's lust, on one another. They become deformed and complain to Judge Pao, but he's more interested when the Exorcist offers him Emmanuelle. 

While Bruce is away from his gym, it's attacked by Dracula and his "zombies" (the thugs in skeleton-suits). Bruce dresses up like Kato and ambushes the vamp and his henchmen in the quarry, and wouldn't you know it, even the hero's defeat of Dracula entails another sex-joke. Meanwhile, Emmanuelle tries to hump Pao to death. Bruce, who has no particular reason to help Pao, intervenes and preserves the ruler's life. Later Bruce has encounters with Bond and the Man with No Name, defeating them easily. Exorcist and Godfather abandon all subtlety and make a frontal assault on Pao's court to kill the king. Pao shakes the pillar again, causing an underworld earthquake. (At least Chi Lo didn't make a sex joke around the pillar, though one could have been halfway justified.) Bruce beats down Exorcist and Godfather, but somehow Pao gets the idea that Bruce wants his throne, when Bruce just wants to quit working for him. Pao calls upon the red-robed guy from the credits, who's some sort of court magician, since he conjures up a dozen mummies to battle the hero. Caine, One Arm (wielding a knife but no sword) and Popeye show up to join in the fun. Once all the villains are defeated, Bruce demands to be sent back to Earth (in a new body, one supposes) by Pao, and everyone waves bye-bye.

I'm of two minds about whether DRAGON is a valid crossover. The presence of humor doesn't keep a given story as being a crossover, but Chi Lo plays so fast and loose with all of these fictional personas that the effect of DRAGON is like that of MAD magazine commingling disparate pop-culture characters solely for the sake of incongruity. However, the idea that all of these characters are dead-- when in truth nearly none of them were genuinely ever alive-- makes this underworld seem a bit like an archetypal state of being, where even "real" Bruce Lee has become more legend than mortal. In any case, I rate DRAGON as having fair mythicity. Despite all of its goofy flights of fancy, it does reveal how thoroughly Western culture was impinging on the culture of Hong Kong, and possibly on that of China as a whole, not least by expressing a desire to see Asian characters like Zatoichi sharing a place at the pop-fiction table with the famous American or European icons. (And there's something rather singular about the director's obsession with Bruce Lee's sexual prowess, which obsession he seems to have thought his audience would share.)                                       

      

ASSASSIN (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*  

Twenty minutes from the end of this film, I was ready to describe this obscure Taiwanese chopsocky as an entirely naturalistic martial drama, about noble Chinese patriots seeking to assassinate Mongke Khan (Bai Ying), the head of a Mongolian invasion force attacking China. But at that point in the film, the Chinese leader decides that he wants one of his commanders, Ling (Tien Peng), to impersonate a Chinese officer who's been condemned for betraying China to the Mongols. And how does the official want Ling to bring about this imposture? Why, he brings in a tanner who usually cuts off animal skins and asks the guy to cut off the traitor's facial skin, which Ling then wears into the Mongolian camp-- a gambit which is for the most part a big success. This is ASSASSIN's only enjoyably brain-fried moment, though, for most of the rest of the movie is dull.

At the film's outset, Su Mei (Hsu Feng), girlfriend of Ling, has planned an imposture of her own. After some breast-beating about the danger of the mission, Su takes the place of a concubine who's going to be sent to Mongke. Once Su gets close to the enemy leader, she can pull a Chinese version of the Biblical Deborah by slaying Mongke with her knives. Before she gets there, we're introduced to Mongke, who seems to be a tough, resourceful leader, with a sister, Ha Shi Li (Chia Ling), who's also a martial artist. However, Mongke figures out the plot and ambushes Su. Armed only with two short daggers, Su makes hash of several Mongolians, but Mongke himself easily masters her, even though he doesn't do any impressive kung fu stunts. He then imprisons her, clearly thinking about making use of her, though somehow, he never quite does so. 

 Ha Shi Li, however, signals some possible sibling issues, for she seems very jealous of Mongke's attentions to this Chinese lady assassin. Li corners Su in prison, where she could stab Su to death with ease. However, perhaps to prove her martial superiority, Li simply cuts Su's bonds and challenges her to a duel, Su's double knives against Li's sword. It's a very cool diva-battle, better than the two actresses' fight in THE GREAT HUNTER, and easily the best scene in the movie, including the wacky face-stealing scene. Mongke and his guards forestall the duel's conclusion. However, prior to that, Su cleverly plants a seed in Li's mind, that if she's so great she ought to go challenge Ling to a contest at the Chinese camp. Li does so, and though she doesn't defeat Ling she does slice up a bunch of no-name soldiers, so that both kung-fu divas get an equal chance to shine. Indeed, though Hsu Feng is pictured as being more glamorous than Chia Ling, both are really the only good reasons to watch the film.

The final general dust-up is nothing special, but it has one curious moment. Mongke fights Ling, and Ling manages to stab the Mongol. Su comes up from behind Mongke and also stabs him, at which point Li tries to stab Su from behind. Mongke, who's apparently fallen in love with Su in some off-camera scene, flings Ling and Su away from him, and flings a dagger at-- his sister, in order to save Su. This might have made a little sense had Mongke actually forced himself on Su, only to become so besotted with her that he valued her life over his own, or his sister's. But if that was the intention, the filmmakers totally muffed the execution.       

NATSUKI CRISIS BATTLE (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*  

YouTube's programming guided me to this two-part anime, of which I'd never heard. A manga and a game were produced around the same time, and while there's probably no authoritative reference as to which of the three was out of the gate first, I suspect that the game was paramount. For once, the OVA and the manga are equally brief, consisting (from what I can tell) of just two episodes.

And while most anime productions remain close to their manga source material (or vice versa), here it's as if someone said to the respective creators, "Do what you like, as long as you're telling the story of a high-school karate expert named Kisumi Natsuki." The manga shows young Kisumi getting into fights with male opponents, some of whom are just fellow judo/karate students, while others are more aggressive challengers, such as the school's sumo club. The anime pits Kisumi against a rival school, some of whom wear masks during an attack on Kisumi and a friend, But NATSUKI the anime is probably only thirty percent about the heroine battling male opponents, and seventy percent about Kisumi contending with female opponents. The first part of CRISIS largely deals with Kisumi bonding with a female student adept in wrestling, name of Rina, even though the two girls are feisty enough to fight one another. In the second part, Kisumi and Rina are both challenged by another girl wrestler, Kandori, who's somewhat exceptional for the time in being a FBB (though preceded by another lady bodybuilder in 1989's ANGEL COP).  

Kandori is allied to the bad high schoolers and has some vague relationship with Kisumi's current judo sensei, but there's no love-stuff in the anime, while there's only a tiny bit of potential romance in the manga. Of the two, the anime is much more enjoyable for the kinetic battle scenes, though story-wise it's absolutely average. 

DRAGONBALL: THE MAGIC BEGINS (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

This Taiwanese-Philippine production, the second live-action adaptation of the DRAGONBALL franchise, seem party patterned on the first anime film, CURSE OF THE BLOOD PEARLS, at least in terms of giving the main hero a more formidable first foe. Further, the tyrant looking for the wish-granting Dragon Balls, a bull-man named "King Horn," seems based on the folkloric Chinese figure sometimes translated as "Bull Devil King," whom I don't recall ever seeing in the manga from which the franchise arose.

Despite the overall cheap look of the production, the film tries to channel the "Star Wars" look at the opening. King Horn, who already possesses two of the legendary Dragon Balls, uses a giant spaceship and an army of costumed minions to ravage the countryside. For some reason he thinks the other five can be found in the same general area, which happens to be the case (largely for the convenience of the narrative). Despite all the sci-fi trappings, Horn's future antagonist, young Son Goku (Chi-Chiang Chen), seems to dwell in a bucolic fantasy-world with his kung-fu teacher, which reflects the fairy-tale atmosphere of the early manga stories. Goku has fantastic fighting-abilities and a magical battle-staff, though in the dubbed version I watched, he's called "Monkey Boy" but there are no obvious references to the manga's concept that the hero's a monkey-like ET who was adopted by a human teacher. 

Other familiar characters from the manga, such as Bulma and Yamcha, get such new names as "Seetoo" and "Westwood," which may have some relevance to the licensing status of the movie. Seetoo is a feisty young woman who owns one of the dragon balls and seeks to find others, though for less villainous motives than King Horn. In the manga Bulma and Yamcha hook up, but the hour-and-a-half film can only touch on this romantic subplot. Seetoo's main function here is to get Goku out of his rural rut so that he's ready to oppose evil when King Horn comes calling. A few other characters appear-- Piggy, a pig-demon, and "Turtle Man," another kung-fu teacher-- but they're probably there largely to appeal to the DRAGONBALL fan base. There's another character, possibly derived from BLOOD PEARLS, and she wants the Dragonballs to revive all the people of her village, whom King Horn slew. There aren't that many more characters here than in the anime movie, but in the live-action movie, the support-characters seem to be tripping over one another.

If one can overlook some really bad FX work (Seetoo uses a bazooka to blow up an enemy, who's clearly a dummy being blasted). BEGINS is at least a watchable mediocrity, at least for the lively though not distinctive fight-scenes. Chen's naive young hero has a certain amount of charm, but he too seems to get lost in the overburdened plot. Still, I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch this version than one of the Japanese cartoon-movies.             

SHADOW GIRL (1971)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*    

I think I gave SHADOW GIRL a "fair" mythicity rating purely because it was so unusual to see someone attempt to mash up a swordplay-chopsocky with an "invisible person" comedy. It's not that SHADOW does anything especially outstanding, but I have to give it credit for trying something different.

We don't find out for a while what made Yin Chu (Lily Li) invisible, though only in daytime. She runs around playing pranks with her invisibility, convincing people that she's a ghost. But she interferes with a powerful gangster, and he sets assassins to kill the "spirit." The comedy-action scenes are okay, but I forgot most of them after one day, except for a climax in which Yin battles two old hermits, a blind one with acute hearing and a crippled one with telekinetic powers.

  To build up the comedy even more, Yin has a meet-cute with a handsome doctor (An Ping), and this leads to a comic wedding scene. Lily Li brings an effervescent charm to this lightweight role. On some level I suppose SHADOW GIRL deserves its obscurity, but at least it's the most atypical Shaw Brothers chopsocky I've ever encountered. 

DRAGON PRINCESS (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

There's no good reason to have Sonny Chiba's name plastered on top of this movie when he's only in about ten minutes at the start. Real star Etsuko Shihomi had already starred in four excellent chopsockies in the SISTER STREET FIGHTER series (1974-5), any one of which outclasses this relatively feeble effort.

Though PRINCESS is, like the SISTER films, set in 1970s Asia, the plot feels like a period-piece, specifically LADY SNOWBLOOD, which concerned a woman trained since childhood to avenge the wrongs done to a parental figure. One small difference is that in this scenario, the female child witnesses the wrongdoing. Isshin (Chiba) is a karate master who's attacked by an ambitious rival, Nikaido (Bin Amatsu) and Nikaido's henchmen. One of the henchmen supplies the film's main metaphenomenal presence, as well as seeming to belong to a period-chopsocky: a white-haired man who, though blind, can hear well enough to fling darts with deadly accuracy. One such dart puts out one of Isshin's eyes, and when the assailants leave Isshin in his humiliated state, Isshin commands his little daughter Yumi to pull the dart from his eye-- one of the movie's few memorable scenes. Isshin then takes Yumi to the US, where he trains her in karate until she reaches young womanhood and is played by Shihomi. She spends most of her young life being trained to gain revenge on Nikaido. One other minor divergence from LADY SNOWBLOOD is that she protests the rigorous training in her youth, but for the rest of the movie seems to be okay with having been so constricted. She and her father spar a little in this sequence but eventually he gets sick and dies, after which Yumi travels to Japan for vengeance.

Shihomi looks great as she pursues Nikaido and the various henchmen, and she gains aid from another martial artist (Yasuaki Kurata) in her quest for revenge. However, though Shihomi had already proven herself a charismatic fake-fighter in the SISTER films, here the fights are sloppily coordinated and are hindered by pan-and-scan in the only available print. I note that the director only helmed eight other films, so maybe the producers got what they paid for. Some scenes are draggy and some move too fast to have any emotional impact. Only at the end, when Yumi and her buddy square off with the villains do things pick up. The film's other memorable scene, taking place in a field of wheat-stalks, shows a wounded Yumi finding a way to neutralize the blind killer's hearing-advantage, by attaching tiny bells to the wheat-stalks, so their jangling of these diabolical devices drives the killer to distraction. (One online review had the notion that the white-haired man was simply going berserk for no reason.) The henchman's hearing is still so acute that he manages to knock down the bells with his darts, but then Yumi attacks and kills him. She also duels Nikaido to the death, but this isn't nearly as impressive. PRINCESS looks like a rush job and has little to recommend it, even compared to many of the lesser HK chopsockies.        

NINJA WARS (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*  

It's rather rare to have a film be both delirious and dull, but Kosei Saito's NINJA WARS managed it.

Based on a Japanese novel, WARS' thoroughly weird content feels undermined by Saito's pokey direction, though I must admit the English dubbing probably did the movie no favors. This is one of the few films I've seen in which Hiroyuki Sanada plays the lead role, as I've most often seen him in support-roles.

   

The viewer's forced to assimilate a whole lot of crazy in the first thirty minutes. The shogun's daughter Ukyo (Noriko Watanabe) is married to one of the local lords, but rival lord Danjo wants to make her his wife, at least partly because of her royal status. Evil wizard Kashin, leader of at least four other "devil monks," shows up on Danjo's doorstep and reveals how to do the dirty deed. Ukyo can be made to fall in love with Danjo if she drinks an aphrodisiac made from her own tears-- or, failing that, those of the twin sister that even Ukyo doesn't know about. According to Kashin, Ukyo and her sister Kagaribi (also Watanabe) were the result of a liaison between a Japanese father and a Christian (non-Japanese?) mother. Apparently, a different lord decides to adopt Ukyo but doesn't want a matched set, discarding Kagaribi in the wilds. To her good fortune (and sort-of that of the villains), a ninja clan finds and adopts the castoff, raising her as a ninja-- so that as an adult she finds love with fellow ninja Jotaro (Sanada).

 The devil monks kidnap Kagaribi and transport her to Danjo's castle. They plan to force the girl ninja to weep in a way that gives them all some jollies: to serially rape her. However, Kagaribi happens to have mastered the ability to conjure up a scythe of light, and with it, she decapitates herself. Nothing daunted, the monks take one of Danjo's courtesans, behead her, switch the heads of the two bodies, and then bring both back to life with their magic. If they could do that, why not just plant Kabarigi's back on her own body? Details, details. Then they rape the courtesan-body with the Kabarigi-head, so that they can siphon off her tears for the potion, which they brew in a special magic kettle. The Kabarigi-Head body then turns evil, and one of the villains dubs her "Lady Hellfire." The body with the head of the courtesan Chidori goes mad and runs off, whereon Jotaro comes across her when he's seeking Kagaribi. He naturally doesn't recognize her old body with a new head, though he's somewhat bemused by the fact that she wears a Christian cross like Kabarigi did. He fights with the devil monks and steals their magic kettle from them, which means they can't brew their love-potion.

The plot wanders to and fro, punctuated with some various listless swordfights, and at some point Jotaro encounters the married noblewoman Ukyo. By this time I believe he knows she's not his Kabarigi, but her resemblance to his true love causes him considerable disquiet. If I'm not mistaken Ukyo falls for Jotaro, showing that at heart she shares the romantic tastes of her sister. At some point Lady Hellfire suggests to her fellow villains that they don't need the love-potion. Because she shares Ukyo's face, the Lady can simply sleep with Ukyo's husband, set him up to be knocked off, and then remarry Danjo. At some point, though, Danjo does try to use the potion on Real Ukyo, but Jotaro intervenes.

Neither the metaphysical nor the psychological aspects of the movie are well-executed, and I suspect that a subbed version of WARS would have been no easier to follow. Sonny Chiba appears unbilled, and according to IMDB the semi-legendary sword-maker Hattori Hanzo was supposed to be in the story. I never heard the name but I will consider NINJA WARS a provisional crossover on that basis. But there's no "fighting femmes" here because the only lady ninja in the movie just uses her weapon to kill herself.  

I        

CHIN SHA YEN (1977)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

"Bring me the head of Chin Sha Yen" (or something very like that) cries some gang-leader halfway through this dumbass Chinese blend of kung-fu and hardboiled-detective genres. I listened to this dopey movie twice and that's the only time I heard the proper name that forms the movie's title. I only know, thanks to the HKMDB, that the character is played by the actor Wang Kuan-Hsiung, who would get a much better acting opportunity in the following year's LADY CONSTABLES. But I don't think the English translation is totally at fault for CHIN's problems. This is the sort of bumptious movie where characters walk around proclaiming themselves to be "The Just Man" or "The Wanderer from the North," just to make it seem like something dramatic is going on.

 So in this case, a martial maiden named Hsiao (Polly Shang Kuan) gets to be the hardboiled dick of the story. After her uncle is slain by a gold-masked man, Hsiao ranges from town to town, looking for the criminal, who may or may not be identical with a legendary kung-fu master, The Golden Bird. Clearly "Golden Bird" would have made a better title, since that's the person Hsiao keeps seeking. Her inquiries cause the killer to send some hired thugs after her. A stranger who calls himself The Wanderer intervenes to protect Hsiao, slaying one hireling with, of all things, a scroll that elongates so as to somehow cut the hireling's throat. Despite this rescue, Hsiao immediately suspects that the Wanderer may actually be the Golden Bird, so she rejects his aid. Yet he keeps showing up to help her, and so do two other kung-fu dudes, the aforementioned Just Man and some guy whose name I didn't hear. They're all in an inn when some gang-leader calls for the head of Chin Sha Yen, and I swear I never heard the name repeated. Hsiao keeps blundering about, so eventually the Golden Bird himself shows up. But is it the original, or an impostor? I doubt even the audiences in 1977 really cared. The script keeps a fair quantity of marvels-- an umbrella that can be used as a shield against swords, combatants that can run up the sides of trees-- and that was probably all anyone expected. Shang Kuan is definitely the starring character here, despite the flatness of the character, and on top of that, the fights are pretty desultory. This is a little odd, since the director started as a stunt guy. I didn't recognize any of the movies on which he served as a director, except 1979's ONE FOOT CRANE, an equally bland offering, but with Lily Li in the martial maiden role.