To Kill With Intrigue (1977)

Original title: 劍花煙雨江南

The Martial World. A group known as the Bee Faces (because they really love to put human-faced bees on tattoos and poison darts, as one does) attacks the birthday of Martial World big muck Lei Chi Fung (Ma Chi), in revenge for an attempt at wiping out the Bee Faces fifteen years ago Lei Chi Fung instigated.

Lei’s son Hsiao Lei (Jackie Chan) learns of the attack plans early on, and does his best to drive birthday guests and peers alike away by acting like an ass, instead of, oh, telling them the truth. He does the same with Chin Chin (Yu Ling-Lung), the servant girl carrying his child. He has secretly asked his friend Chen Chun (Shin Il-Ryong), the Vagabond of the Martial World, to take care of her if he doesn’t make it, so we can’t blame him for lacking foresight as well as emotional maturity.

In something of an ironic twist, Hsiao Lei is going to be the only survivor of the massacre of his family, for the leader of the Bee Faces – whom we later learn to be called Ting Chan Yen (Hsu Feng) – spares his life. She also tells him that his father may not always have been the pillar of virtue he knew him as, a deep scar on her face he gave her during the death of her parents, the leaders of the Bee Faces, when she was just five years old speaking to that.

Her reasons for sparing Hsiao Lei despite her far superior kung fu are complicated. In part, she appears to see how much her own act of killing his parents mirror the acts she kills them for; in part she’s rather smitten with him; and in the part she’s actually saying out loud, she’s going to watch him suffer under the sad fate of his family.

During the following weeks, she’s certainly going to stalk Hsiao Lei, in turns declaiming dramatically, repeatedly saving his skin, or just watching him longingly, creepily.

Hsiao Lei for his part is hell-bent on returning to Chin Chin. However, it turns out his good friend Chen Chun might not be as trustworthy a man as he believes him to be. The characters will also get involved in the troubles of the Dragon Escort group of Dragon Five (George Wang Chueh), the nicest guy in the martial world. You can imagine what he’ll eventually get for that.

Much of what has been written about this Jackie Chan wuxia made shortly before Chan would start developing his distinctive screen persona (well, actually two personas, if you ask me) is focussing on blaming Lo Wei’s film for not being “A Jackie Chan Movie”. It certainly isn’t, but once you’ve got over the shock that Jackie was working as a martial artist/actor here and not as the movie star he’d turn into, you should be able to appreciate the film for what it is.

Particularly since “what it is”, is a fantastic late 70s wuxia, full of characters whose internal life is fully externalized through larger than life melodrama, martial artists that are all so utterly committed to their fighting bits that dressing in colour-coded group togs or using floating coffins for one’s entrance just is a normal Tuesday for them. Everybody has a fantastic sense of fashion and style as well, starting with Ting Chan Yen’s generally mono-coloured gowns and certainly not ending with even random assassins walking around with the most striking red hats, all the better to get a dramatically shot entrance.

The martial arts choreography is wonderful as well, combining some great “realistic” skills with moments of fantastic imagination. Ting Chan Yen going at a group of villains with knives is a thing to behold, as is a moment concerning an assassin, a tree, a sharp object and a Jackie kick you have to see to believe. Things are appropriately brutal when they need to be – the main villain’s death is particularly gruesome in that regard.

All of this takes place in front of impressive backdrops. Lo makes incredible use of South Korean locations that are a real selling point for the cinema of a small place like Hong Kong, where the regular viewer often feels acquainted with every nook and cranny a wuxia could be shot in. Lo uses the opportunity to get properly wide-screen staging fights in the most spectacular surroundings he can find, and really making every shot count there.

On a narrative level, this is very much a wuxia where the easy distinctions between good and evil tend to be unclear and shifting, and even good deeds like what Ting will eventually do for Hsiao Lei will be done in the cruellest possible way. In this world, the woman who killed one’s parents can be much more trustworthy than one’s best friend. Of course, the film knows that the death of Hsiao Lei’s parents is the end of Ting’s very own revenge flick, and shows us what happens after the revenge, or rather, the confusion when one survives the only act one has lived for.

Hsu Feng’s portrayal of Ting is highly effective, hitting the high melodramatic notes the film’s tone needs but also showing the nuances of her deeply complicated feelings. There’s an intensity to her performance Chan at this stage can never quite reach, and while he certainly isn’t bad here, he simply can’t match the complexity of anger, longing, and sadness his co-star exudes, and often comes over as just as bit sulky in comparison.

So, instead of reading this as an unsuccessful Jackie Chan vehicle, I rather see To Kill with Intrigue as an excellent Hsu Feng film, and one of Lo Wei’s visually most arresting films.

Three Films Make A Post: Survival is its own Journey.

Antarctic (2018): A cynic might say there’s not much new for the survival genre in Joe Penna’s movie about Mads Mikkelsen finding himself stranded in the Arctic and starting a dangerous attempt towards safety to rescue the lone survivor (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) of a helicopter come to save him. But then, this cynic here would say there’s alas very little new in life at all, so I’m not going to criticize a film for making a very good entry inside genre lines. And really, there’s so much to like here, starting with Mads Mikkelsen’s controlled performance that seems utterly believable and has little problem convincing that we are indeed witnessing a desperate man trying to survive without the actor ever needing to lay things on thick. Also wonderful are the nature photography that manages to find the point where a landscape can be beautiful but also utterly indifferent to all human concerns, and a script that is very good at providing Mikkelsen with opportunity to portray the struggle between the desperate need for survival and his better nature.

Police Story (1985): This one’s an eternal classic of Hong Kong action cinema (and therefore even more so of action cinema in general), full of the kind of stunts that aren’t just to be described as “jaw-dropping” but which will make your jaw drop for real, with the typical Jackie Chan mix of low-brow but high physical creativity slapstick and insane action where even less glass remains unbroken than in other Hong Kong films. Was there still sugar glass in Hong Kong after they shot the climax? I doubt it.
If one were a bore, one might complain that the slapstick and the cop on the edge business of the film don’t always flow into one another as organically as they could, but since Jackie’s damn great at both sides of the equation as an actor and as a director, I can’t say I ever cared watching the film. At the very least, both slapstick and action movies are about bodies in motion, so there’s always that most natural of connections.


BOO! (2019): There are some moments of the kind of dramaturgic awkwardness you encounter in films with a budget that’s a bit too low for their ambitions, but there are elements in Luke Jaden’s film about a wavering mixed-race family encountering a supernatural threat that will break them apart even more than anything of what they get up to without it which I found genuinely haunting. There’s something about the way the performances, the notion of how the nightmarish supernatural widens the gaps between the family members and rips open never truly healed wounds, and some just great, memorable moments of horror (even if the special effects are a bit crap) come together that I found more than a little disquieting and sad, and while I’m still not quite sure how and why the film affected me this way, it just might do the same thing to you.