Three Films Make A Post: Let Don Lee’s Fist Come Unto Thee

Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025): This horror action film about a trio of exorcists for hire – the shamanistic medium with demon powers (Seohyun), the shlub (Lee Da-Wit), and the dude who will punch the demon right out of you (Ma Dong-seok aka Don Lee) – take on a particularly difficult case during which all of the exorcism movie clichés will appear, barely comprehensible lore will be spouted, and Ma Dong-seok will punch everything – demons, minions, a portal to hell, the furniture. As directed by first-timer Lim Dae-hee, this is fast, low-brow fun that pretty much knows the kind of pulp joys it wants to deliver and goes about this business with enough verve to distract from how little substance this actually has.

Plus, you can learn about the six stages of exorcism.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! aka Kutabare akutô-domo: Tantei jimusho 23 (1963): It’s pretty impossible to live up to this title, and Seijun Suzuki clearly doesn’t want to. Though while this has a couple of very fun action sequences, it mostly demonstrates everything the Nikkatsu higher ups didn’t like about Suzuki: his unwillingness to just tell a simple, straightforward story, his bizarre sense of humour, his intense distractibility. All of this does get in the way of building even the least amount of tension, but leaves Suzuki and his audience much space to enjoy all kinds of colourful – also literally, because give Suzuki a colour film and he’ll colour the crap out of it and your eyes – bits and pieces of comedy, strange sexual hang-ups, and Jo Shishido saying “yes” to everything Suzuki throws at him.

This never reaches the genuine unity of bizarre artistry of something like Tokyo Drifter or Branded to Kill but is still pretty damn fun, unless you go in expecting a straightforward crime film. But why would you?

The Shaolin Plot aka 四大門派 (1977): This Golden Harvest production directed by Wong Fung marks a rather important point in the career of Sammo Hung – here, he has clearly reached early mastership in the art of martial arts choreography, has a fun, prominent villain part (featuring some fascinating hairstyle decisions), and has assembled much of the team that’ll accompany him in the following years, when he’d go on to make his own films.

Stylistically, this very much wants to be a Shaw Brothers shaolin movie, just with very different ideas about choreography – much more physically brutal and directly acrobatic – and a script – also by Wong Fung – that lacks the easy competence of the sort of thing Ni Kuang would have written. While the martial arts are utterly fantastic, there is, particularly in the middle part, an unfocused and dragging quality to everything else, with scenes that never seem to want to end for no good reason, and surprisingly little personality – even short-hand one – to most of the characters.

This is what keeps the film from being a real classic of its style in my eyes, though the fights alone make it pretty unmissable for anyone interested in the transitionary phases of Hongkong cinema between the reigns of Shaw and Golden Harvest.

Three Films Make A Post: The World Has Come To An End The World Calls Upon The Hunter

Badland Hunters aka 황야 (2024): Hei Myeong-haeng’s post-apocalyptic action movie is good fun, with Ma Dong-seok (or Don Lee, if you prefer) and Ahn Jiy-hye making pretty great action heroes – the latter really throws herself into her action scenes while looking totally focussed – a hissable villain of the highest degree, and often very effective action choreography. It also has quite a few elements that remind me of the abandon of good, classical post-apocalyptic exploitation cinema, which isn’t as good for it as that may sound. This way, it becomes rather more obvious how much the film pulls its punches, how nice it feels at its core when it could use a bit of nastiness there to go with the theoretically nasty things it features.

Tora-san, His Tender Love aka Otoko wa tsurai yo: Fûten no Tora (1970): There’s a certain, well, a big, actually, be-there done that quality to much of the Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man film series as far as I know them, even this early in the cycle. However, this isn’t really to the detriment of the films when watched responsibly (Tora-san is only to be binged in the most dire of circumstances), but provides the films a comfortable shoe kind of quality. You know the characters, the kind of jokes the film’s going to make, Tora’s faults and foibles, and so on and so forth, but there’s something comforting and kind to the knowledge that fits its main character’s fits of – often badly applied – kindness beyond the fool’s bluster curiously well.

Last Night at Terrace Lanes (2024): Speaking of cinematic comfort food, sometimes you just want to be comforted by the tale of an estranged father and daughter bonding again through the fight against math-based cultists who are attacking the bowling alley they once bonded in, slaughtering all and sundry there.

Because this is 2024, there’s also a bit of Lesbian teen romance in here.

Jamie Nash’s film is never original or deep, but it does the classic low budget movie thing of telling a simple story taking place in a confined space effectively rather well. There’s really nothing at all wrong with that.

In short: The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (2019)

Original title: 악인전

After a fender bender ends up with the driver of the car that had been bumped into being knifed to death rather enthusiastically by the other party, cop Jeong Tae-seok (Kim Mu-yeol) actually takes time out from uselessly harassing gangster boss Jang Dong-soo (Ma Dong-seok) and develops the theory that the killer is a serial killer whose modus operandi makes it difficult to identify him as such- Apparently, there are really a lot of knife murders in Korean traffic. His boss, with whom he is basically at war because of his private feud against Dong-soo (who happens to be said boss’s other employer, too, so we can’t quite hold this against Tae-seok) does not buy it, particularly not in the typically rude and assholish way Tae-seok is trying to sell it. Obviously, he’s going to keep working the case anyway.

As luck will have it, Jang Dong-soo is the killer’s next prospective victim; he’s just too good at fighting and taking damage to get killed. At first, the gangster interprets the attack as part of an emerging gang war with an old buddy of his, but eventually, he and Tae-seok will team up to get the killer, all the while trying to use and trick each other for their own separate ends.

Lee Won-tae’s thriller mostly lives on style and the abilities of his actors to sell the convoluted plot as theatre of big manly emotions. At the same time, the film is not shying away from portraying its non-serial killing leads as deeply unpleasant and horrible people, in the good tradition of South Korean cinema to never portray a police officer or a gangster completely positively. Though, for once, our main cop is somewhat competent, at least when he gets off his ass to do something a bit more advanced than punching people. We do get enough of the punching, too, obviously – and of course also of Ma Dong-seok using his physicality rather impressively.

The film isn’t too bad at mixing the clichés and tropes of the cop and gangster love/hate fest and that of the serial killer thriller quite productively, making some of it curiously surprising via the remixing of tropes despite lacking all surface originality.

So there’s a lot of very stylishly staged genre fun to have here, with big performances, big drama and big violence. Well, until the final twenty minutes or so arrive, when the film’s going for a really overcooked final plot twist, all the while shouting how awesome capital punishment for the mentally ill is. Which is not a great look for The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil to go out on, if you ask me.

Unstoppable (2018)

aka Raging Bull

Original title: 성난황소

Once, Kang Dong-cheol (Ma Dong-seok) was a rather successful gang boss known for his very effective fists (which nearly become like unto a thing of iron). But marrying civilian Ji-soo (Song Ji-hyo) – described as “an angel” but clearly the kind of angel who does carry a flaming sword and a pretty sharp tongue too – convinced him to retire. Now, he’s in the fish wholesale business, and overcompensates for his past by acting so meekly, he’s letting himself being pushed around by idiots he’d have (deservedly) wrecked as his old self. Much to Ji-soo’s pained disapproval, Dong-cheol has also become a bit of a glutton for putting money he doesn’t really have into shady projects that’ll never pay off.

The peaceful life ends when a series of chance happenings points Gi-tae (Kim Sung-oh), the psychopathic leader of a human trafficking (and illegal plastic surgery) ring, in the direction of Ji-soo. When he and his gang kidnap her, Dong-cheol has to get back to some of his old form and manner to rescue her; while Gi-tae should probably look for a better rock to hide under.

Obviously, Kim Min-ho’s Unstoppable is a movie built on some of the rules of the Taken-alike. For my tastes, it’s a particular good example of that action thriller sub-genre that makes efforts to get rid of some its problems and seems generally less mean-spirited as many of the (often highly entertaining, don’t get me wrong) films in which Liam Neeson punches foreigners with his gigantic former CIA fists.

There is, for one, very little punching of foreigners, South Korean villains being well and good enough for our hero, or rather, his fists. There’s also comparatively little torture on screen, most of it ending up with threats and bad jokes, the film believably working on the assumption that Ma punching you and giving you a patented dead eyed stare should really be just as effective.

The film also does its best to get rid of some of the dramatically lame conventions of its sub-genre. So we actually get introduced to Ji-soo as a character before she’s kidnapped, turning her into a lot more than a quest object in the process; and later on, she actually gets her own sub-plot in which she tries to escape her kidnappers in some of the best suspense sequences in the film, at once making the stakes more emotionally involving for the audience (did anyone ever care for Liam’s “Little Girl” as a person?), and giving Ji-soo as a character room to breath.

The three leads are doing a pretty great job: Ma, as mentioned, has the whole business about becoming a force of (punching) nature while staring at you threateningly down pat, but he’s also believably vulnerable when he needs to be, selling the goofy meek guy who falls for stupid plans just as well as the tougher self. Song’s note-perfect as his sometimes beleaguered, sometimes charmed wife, getting to nag without becoming the “nagging wife” trope, and showing a lot of strength and guts when the situation calls for it, making the question why a tough alpha type gangster would want to give up his old life and personality for love more or less a no-brainer and selling her as an actual person who is going to do something to save herself too.

Last but not least, Kim Sung-oh’s performance as the crazy kidnapper boss is fantastically overacted in the best manner, completely vile, sometimes in a funny way, always genuinely punchable and sometimes just as genuinely frightening. It’s pretty much how you’d imagine the Joker to be without make-up (and if DC ever wanted to cast anyone but a white guy in the role, they have the perfect candidate right here). The actor sells Gi-tae as an actual threat, too, and very much as the guy you’d most want to see get punched out by Ma. In fact, waiting for the guy getting to get his lights punched out is one of the great joys of the film at hand.

Tonally, the film’s very typical of South Korean action and thriller cinema, with a lot of comedy elements involved but staged so that the humour never gets in the way of the serious business, but actually grounds it as comic relief is supposed to do but nearly never does. Given Kim Min-ho’s general hand with action and suspense sequences in Unstoppable, it’s probably a good thing too.