The Lady Assassin (1983)

Original title: 清宮啟示錄

The Qing emperor (Ching Miao) has come to his final years and is beginning to think about his successor. His favourite for the role is the 14th Prince (Max Mok Siu-Keung). Fourteen is young, he’s inexperienced and, as events will show, more than just a bit of a shallow idiot, whose more interested in looking righteous than the difficult business of actually being it. But least, he appears to not be actively malevolent. This can’t be said about the 4th Prince (Lau Wing) – he’s a man deeply in love with himself, palace intrigue and more often than not being evil for evil’s sake. Four has gotten wind of who his father plans to make his successor, and is not at all against murdering his own brother (well, half-brother, one hopes for the women involved).

The 4th Prince’s problem when it comes to assassinating his rival is that his brother has a very capable bodyguard and advisor in form of virtuous and highly efficient martial arts expert Tsang Jing (Norman Tsui Siu-Keung) – coming pre-packaged with his two female servants/martial arts students/probably lovers Jade (Yeung Ching-Ching) and Pearl (Daisy Cheung King-Yu) – and Tsang Jing isn’t just making the 14th Prince look like a better man than he actually is, he’s also easily thwarting most assassination attempts.

Eventually, the 4th Prince will acquire his very own martial arts expert in form of the ambitious Min Gen Yiu (Jason Pai Piao), but even then, a successful assassination seems doubtful and risky. So much so, the 4th Prince seeks out the help of Han revolutionary leader Lui Liu Liang (Ku Feng), promising him to get rid of the laws that suborn the Han Chinese under their Manchu conquerors. If, that is, Lui Liu Liang, or rather, his redoubtable martial artist niece Lui Si Niang (the incredible Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) help him access the decree in which is father has set down his designated successor.

Of course, helping out a man like the 4th Prince might not turn out as happily as one would want.

And that’s only about half of the plot of Tony Lou Chun-Ku’s breathless Shaw Brothers palace intrigue/wuxia mix The Lady Assassin, a film that somehow manages to run breathlessly through an amount of narrative that would provide for three or four seasons of a modern streaming TV show, features about a thousand different fights, yet still has room for rather a lot of complicated characterisation.

In most wuxia films, Lau Wing’s villain would be a one-note moustache twirler, but here, the guy’s abhorrent but also much more nuanced than you’d expect. As an example, the scene in which he convinces Lui Liu Lang and his family to throw their lot in with him by perfectly emulating a man of honour and conscience is a perfect portrayal of the kind of narcissist who always appears to believe in his own lies and empty promises a little (if you’ve never seen such a thing in real life, I can’t recommend the experience), and always finds a bad excuse for not acting on them he also appears to believe, however untrue it may be. Still, enjoying his own ability to pretend to be an honourable man, he will even try to implement his promises, until he gets the tiniest pushback. Then, he folds like the utterly weak man he is at his power-grubbing core.

As a whole, this is one of those wuxia where the most honourable characters – Tsang Jing and Lui Si Niang are genuinely good people – find themselves tied to the will and plans of characters whose nature is abhorrent to them once revealed, and can only break free from obligations, rules, and lies through acts of insane violence. Being in any contact with power can apparently only be cleansed through blood and vengeance.

Speaking of acts of violence, the martial arts choreography by Poon Kin-Kwan is absolutely insane – fast, vicious and only occasionally totally fantastical, this is all about speed and movement. Director Lou stages the fights – like everything else in the film – exclusively in angles and shot compositions of maximalist dramatic impact. There’s not subtlety to the direction, but as Lou uses his hammer here, everything doesn’t just look like a nail but indeed is one. It’s pretty incredible, as is how powerful much of the acting is – Lau Wing is a particular standout, but the burning fierceness of Leanne Lau’s gaze, or the dignity only slightly marred by the cynicism of permanent defeat of Ku Feng’s performance, are just as impressive.

To my eyes, The Lady Assassin is an absolute classic of the late period Shaw output, a film as perfect as its final freeze frame.

The Black Tavern (1972)

Original title: 黑店

Stopping off in a tavern, one of those singing beggar monks (Dean Shek Tin) that apparently roam the martial world sings a merry song about a corrupt official who has retired and is now transporting his ill-gotten gains via snowy backways to his future home. This really catches the imagination of a number of evildoers. First and foremost, this is Zheng Shoushan, the Whipmaster, (Ku Feng) and his minions, but also robber teams and individuals with delightful names and shticks like the Five Ghosts of Xiang Xi, the Three Headed Cobra, the Iron Arm, as well as the somewhat more respectable swordsman Zha Xiaoyu (Tung Li).

An increasing number of these guys and gals descend onto yet another tavern everyone is convinced the ex-official must come through on his way to Mar del Lago. It’s already the kind of place guests never leave, unless as mutton, so the influx of murderous martial artists doesn’t exactly make it less safe. As it goes with people like these, they do start killing each other rather quickly, for various reasons, mostly greed.

Sneaking around the tavern is a swordswoman who dresses like the Lady Hermit herself – as it will turn out, Shih Szu reprising her role as Zhang Caibing/Cui Ping from Meng Hua-Ho’s film of the year before.

Teddy Yip Wing-Cho’s The Black Tavern isn’t quite as great as that wuxia classic, but it is certainly a nice diversion from some of the standard tropes of the wuxia, telling its story a little differently. While Zhang Caibing does eventually make quite an impact – there is after all very little that’s better than a heroic swordswoman played by an actress specialized in that sort of thing – much of this plays out like a bottle episode of a TV show whose lead is only there for a third of the shooting schedule, which fires the producers up to make something out of a handful of sets and another handful of character actors.

Cool sets and character actors are things the Shaw Brothers had rather a lot of, and so this a film carried by newcomers and veterans like Ku Feng strutting their stuff, typically great (though not brilliant) fight choreography, and the special delight of some weird but rather nasty people making the world a better place by following their worst impulses and murdering each other gorily. There is a surprising number of decapitations on screen.

As is often the case, the combination of obvious budget constraints and talent leads to a highly entertaining film.

Devil’s Curse (1988)

Warning: some spoilers to follow!

aka Devil Curse

aka Devil Curse Country

Original title: 猛鬼咒

Hong Kong cop Chan Che (Sun Xing) accompanies a group of his police buddies on a Thailand trip. He’s a bit of the party pooper of the operation, or simply the only one who isn’t a total creep, for he is happily married to Wai (Emily Chu Bo-Yee), and not interested in picking up Thai girls with the lads – particularly since the couple now has a baby on the way.

Alas, things turn into a darker direction when Chan helps a local woman named Chuma (Yip Yuk-Ping) get her wallet back from a pickpocket (and beats up the pickpocket’s buddies, because we need at least a martial arts scene early on). Though he doesn’t show more than polite interest, the young woman is very smitten with Chan. So smitten, she jumps at the offer of a statuette that purports to be a god placed in a cage in her wizard father’s wizard den to help her out by teaching her a fitting spell. Chan is soon ensorcelled and seduced, yet still returns to Hong Kong and his wife.

That is of course not going to be that, and Chan soon finds himself beset by visions, spirits and apparitions sent by Chuma and her patron, all as part of a highly dubious campaign to win him over and – eventually – to get rid of his wife.

Up until the point I’ve left the synopsis of To Man-Bo’s Devil Curse, the film is a pretty typical example of the sub-genre of Hongkong CATIII horror about men from Hongkong cheating on their wives while travelling in Thailand or other parts of Southeast Asia, and then getting beset by black magic problems instead of Glenn Close doing nasty stuff to their cats. It’s a bit milder than many CATIII movies of the type: Chan’s not a shitheel played by Anthony Wong, and the black magic business uses a minimum of centipedes and other creepy crawlies. Even our villainess isn’t quite so villainous, but more the naïve victim of a more dangerous power.

Then, once Chan has lost the fight against his own possessed hand and his wife and unborn kid are dead, the movie takes a sudden left turn into a much weirder, goofier and entertaining direction, when Wai’s cousin (she might be Chan’s cousin, because these are typical HK subtitles) decides to use her dangerous half-knowledge of Taoist magic she has picked up from books her Taoist priest daddy (Kwan Hoi-San) leaves laying around. Quickly, the ghost of Wai and her child are put into a mannequin and an incredibly ugly doll, respectively, and things escalate into sudden vampirism, several magical duels in the inimitable Hong Kong style, and other particularly enjoyable things.

That’s not exactly what I came for or expected from Devil Curse, but when mannequin possession, a wire fu fight between a ghost (in the usual white gown) and a demon guy with an impressively fake moustache, and many a shot of priests and sorcerers shooting drawn lasers out of every orifice are offered, I’m not the boy to complain, nor one to decline.

Director To dips the ever increasing madness into lots of blue dry ice fog, green spotlights and whatever other colour seems to be appropriate at the moment. When he can’t afford a special effect, he vigorously edits around the problem via triple reaction shots; when he can, he’s making sure the audience really notices the effect. Bonus points to whoever chose the music to needle drop, particularly in the finale: going from John Carpenter to John Williams is as bold as it is awesome, and really hits home the main feeling I left Devil Curse with – that this is a film going all-out to entertain you in its increasingly crack-headed and wonderful way.

Three Films Make A Post: In Bloody Panic Color

Hard Gun (1996): This story of a one-upmanship competition in vengeance between a cop and a gangster seems to me to be quite typical of that era of Thai cinema , at least as far as I understand it, and not only because Panna Rittikrai action directs and Tony Jaa has one of his early minor roles.

The film features some cheap yet fine action and does the mandatory clichéd melodrama well, yet permanently undermines its own strengths by an incessant barrage of comic relief of the most painful sort that never seems to know when to stop (which would preferably be before it even begins). How much enjoyment one will get from the movie will certainly depend on one's ability to just ignore those parts of the film. I found them terribly difficult to sit through.

 

Guys in Ghost Hand (1991): No, I don't have the faintest idea what the title is supposed to mean.

This Taiwanese (or HK?, things are a bit unclear) fantasy horror ghost movie thing about the ghost of a raped and later beheaded woman taking vengeance on the descendents of her tormentors starts out very weak, with seemingly hours and hours of uninvolving dialogue scenes between characters without any character and pointless guest roles by people like Wu Ma and Alex Fong. Whenever the silly supernatural menace strikes, or Kara Hui and Ku Feng appear as the squabbling pair of Taoists who are our heroes of the evening, the film becomes instantly entertaining, only to fall back into drabness soon enough.

After about an hour of this, the plot suddenly becomes jumpy like a frightened kitten. Of course, nothing in the film's last half hour makes much sense, but at least everything is very colourful and completely bonkers, which is what I want from a film like this.

 

Clash of the Titans (2010): I could live with the fact that director Louis Leterrrier's film doesn't manage to capture the (often naive) charm of the film he is supposedly remaking and turns it into something that seems to be more based on the God of War videogames than the original.

I can't live with the fact that said videogames are a lot less dumb and a lot more fun than this movie is, or with the fact that Leterrier just has no talent at all for making action scenes exciting or visceral. No film with rideable scorpions has any right to feel this drab.

 

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