The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968)

Original title: 一代劍王

Swordsman Tsai Yieng-Chieh (Tien Peng) is obsessed with vengeance. He is hunting down the men who killed his family to acquire a valuable sword when he was still a child.

But his straightforward way to slaughtering a quartet of vile men is getting increasingly complicated and morally grey. Even though he is trying to keep´cool and removed from the world, connection is not to be escaped: he gets help, if he want to or not, by people with agendas of their own. There’s Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) who saves him from a deadly poison for reasons having something to do with not repeating the injustices of previous generations (and probably love, as well), and who will indeed turn out to be the daughter of one of the men Tsai is planning to take vengeance on. Then there’s Black Dragon (Chiang Nan), the greatest swordsman in the martial world (he’s got a little medal that says so), who helps out our protagonist because he just needs to have a duel with him when the whole vengeance business is over and done with.

Eventually, even one of those horrible killers Tsai has set out to kill right back will turn out to have repented, and be quite helpless now.

I really have underrated director Joseph Kuo. Some of his films may have been shoddy attempts to jump on the newest trends, but at least this early in his career, he was also able to make a proper masterpiece like this wuxia. At first, it appears to be a well-shot but straightforward vengeance tale, with a straightforward hero hunting down straightforward villains for straightforward reasons in a straightforward manner. But with every additional character Kuo introduces, things become less easy and less clear, vengeance turns out to not be just in every case, and the obsession of the martial world with very clear and strict rules of conduct not fit for the more complicated world of the human heart. These rules turn out not be an ethical way to lead one’s life, but a cage one traps oneself and others in.

Visually, Kuo couches this tale in often beautiful and poetic nature shots that position the human drama in a world that mirrors and comments on it, and at times dynamic, at times focussed swordfights. It’s all wonderfully of a piece, where what at first appear to be distractions will turn out to be important parts of the film’s philosophical argument – it’s rather astonishing coming from a typically distractible director like Kuo.

Three Films Make A Post: Winning is all in the execution.

The Killer’s Game (2024): J.J. Perry’s undemanding action comedy mostly recommends itself through a series of increasingly strange set pieces – blandness certainly isn’t a problem here – and through featuring a bunch of actors I always have time for: Dave Bautista, Ben Kingsley, Sofie Boutella, Terry Crews, Alex Kingston, Scott Adkins (with an outrageously silly Scottish accent) and more – all seemingly having fun doing their part with comically broad stereotypes, general silliness, and bloody murder.

Bautista and Boutella are actually able to sell their romance well enough you can’t help rooting for them – that’s more than most action comedies manage, if they even try.

Project Silence (2024): Keeping with bread and butter fun, Kim Tae-gon’s film about super soldier military dogs on the rampage on a bridge mixes elements of the disaster movie with those of horror and action film, stirs in some sneering at the political caste and a bit of conspiracy business and makes an enjoyable enough movie out of it.

This isn’t one of those Korean movies that first fulfil all genre expectations to then go off into the more interesting directions they have in mind, but one that’s simply aiming to be a straightforward piece of genre cinema. It does this with enough of a sense of pace and style to never overstay its welcome.

The Sadness (2021): For thirty minutes or so, I actually found myself believing the (a couple of years ago) hype Rob Jabazz’s extreme version of the infected style zombie movie had going for it. For a time, Jabazz’s slick direction, the very human performances by leads Berant Zhu and Regina Lei, and the gratuitous (at times sexual, generally grotesque) violence really promise something rather special, but the film quickly loses steam, going off on tangents of ultra-broad satire, and the kind of edge-lord business meant to shock that these days only manages to annoy me. Still looks great, mind you, and you could probably make a great fifty minute long short from the film’s best material.

The Return of the 18 Bronzemen (1976)

Original title: 雍正大破十八銅人

Qing prince Yong Zhen (Carter Wong Chia-Ta) doesn’t like the choice of successor to the throne made by his late father, and so changes Daddy’s last will to become emperor himself. Framing the actual successor for an assassination and grabbing the throne is all in a day’s work.

Most of the rest of the movie flashes back to Yong Zhen’s earlier years, when he, an already accomplished martial artist, takes on the role of a commoner to be taught the legendary martial arts of the shaolin. The harsh training regime isn’t quite enough for the guy, so he also commits some minor acts of villainy trying to acquire further shaolin secrets.

Joseph Kuo’s follow-up to to his rather wonderful 18 Bronzemen is a bit of a mess. The first act and the final ten minutes or so seem to belong to a different film – one that doesn’t even have an actual ending. The film appears to believe because its audience already knows the folklore surrounding the destruction of the shaolin temple, it is not its business to actually tell that story even in so far as it touches on what’s happening in its own main plot, the shaolin temple sequence. Which leaves Return not just without an ending but also without a dramatic climax. There’s a pretty random fight against Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng, out to take vengeance on our nasty protagonist, but since we never actually spend time with her, or see the reason for her need for vengeance, or even get a conclusive ending to that fight, this just strengthens the feeling of Return simply being unfinished – or consisting of scenes of two different films with the same cast that have been smashed together without rhyme or reason, or interest in coherence.

The main shaolin training sequences are fun, at least, with some nice further ideas for shaolin torture, I mean training and testing, regimes that make much of visual interest of the film’s small means, fun choreography, and a very accomplished editing flow. This part of the film really only lacks at least somewhat distinctive characters – none of Yong Zhen’s co-students are fleshed out to any degree, and even he doesn’t have anything like actual character development – to be riveting. However, the martial arts are fun enough and the training methods weird enough, to make for a somewhat entertaining middle film, even though it never acquires an actual narrative or makes anything much out of the opportunity to flesh out the backstory of one of he major off-screen villains of kung fu folklore.

The 18 Bronzemen (1976)

Original title: 少林寺十八銅人

His grandmother gives Tang Siu-Lung (Tien Peng) into the care of the Shaolin temple when is just a little boy, so they can train him for vengeance on whoever is responsible for the death of his parents. Though nobody bothers to tell the kid, apparently.

Twenty years or so later, Siu-Lung has grown up beside the abrasive, rude, but also protective, Brother Wan (Carter Wong/Carter Huang Chia-Ta) and the rather less strict Ta Chi (Chiang Nan) as brothers who share a somewhat sadomasochistically coded training regime. Little does Siu-Lung know that the man he is supposed to take vengeance on later for murdering his father is already making plans to assassinate him right in the monastery. But then, Siu-Lung has no clue who his father was or that he was murdered in any case. Before any of that becomes important (or, depending on the cut of the film you watch, before any of that is even mentioned), our hero and his friends must get through the final test of accomplishment for Shaolin kung fu students, an often deadly gauntlet that features some of the best robot armour ancient China has on offer as well as a lot of monks painted bronze and some rather remarkable tests of fortitude.

Afterwards, vengeance on an evil general (Yi Yuan) and a surprise fiancée with considerable fighting skills (house favourite Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) and a tendency for crossdressing and wearing capes await, as well as betrayal and dramatic revelations concerning all three of the Shaolin students.

I’ve never really delved into the body of work of Taiwanese martial arts and wuxia director Joseph Kuo Nan-Hong, and what I’ve seen didn’t exactly impress me much. His films – like most Taiwanese martial arts cinema of the era I’ve seen – tend to the rough around the edges and the scrappy, and while I usually like that sort of thing, I don’t seem to appreciate it as much in martial arts cinema for some reason.

However, a film like The 18 Bronzemen does make a boy rethink some of his prejudices, and there’s certainly going to be more Kuo in my near future. Ironically enough, the versions of The 18 Bronzemen made available by Eureka, doesn’t actually feel all that rough around the edges and scrappy. In fact, particularly in the reconstructed original version of the film, Kuo shows a decidedly great hand at providing his film with a proper flow – there are some simple yet wonderfully effective transition shots (half of which are missing in the the prettier cut of the movie based on a Japanese recut) that make clear passages of time and space easily enough. Even though the film does show its (much lower than Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest) budget from time to time, there’s an energy and visual inventiveness to the direction that always puts itself in service of making the martial arts look cooler than the excellent choreography already is.

Kuo’s sense for flow also helps along the film’s curious structure of half shaolin training film – with that wonderful version of the 36 Chambers that predates the Shaw Brothers interpretation – and half martial arts vengeance movie whose feel borders on wuxia. Of course, you can see where Kuo got his ideas for some (or even most of it) but his execution is excellent and energetic, with neither drama – there’s some great melodrama here as well – nor action letting the side down or slowing the film down.

Being the kind of guy I am, I’m of course particularly fond of the film’s weirder elements, like our main villain’s final defence consisting not just of stolen Shaolin skills he trained with the help of useful little statuettes of bronze as a memory help the movie flashes to when appropriate but also of dressing random fighters up as himself (even doubling up on his transport for it), or male, heterosexual men not being able to identify a cross-dressing Polly Shang-Kuan as a woman (still one of my favourite classic martial arts movie tropes after all these years). I’m also particularly happy how much ass Shang-Kuan is allowed to to kick once her character is finally introduced halfway through, not always a matter of course in films on the martial arts side of the martial arts/wuxia divide. As always, what she lacks in precision during the fights, she makes up for by so fully applying herself to the action one can’t help but be convinced by her fierceness.

Hell, I even like Carter Wong in this one.

Three Films Make A Post: A Comedy of Elf-fish Proportions

Elf (2003): That it has taken me two decades to see this apparent Christmas classic by Jon Favreau about a guy (Will Ferrell) who has grown up as one of Santa’s elves and goes to New York to connect with his true, human father (James Caan) certainly has a lot to do with my general dislike of Ferrell. I still believe the film at hand could have been improved by casting somebody who is actually funny in the lead role, but it’s pretty great anyway. In part, that’s on account of an otherwise great cast – James Caan alone would make this one worth anyone’s time – but mainly the film thrives through the absolute commitment to the bit of David Berenbaum’s script. Or rather, to commit to the bit and then use it to do actual worldbuilding with it, which is further enhanced by the film’s clear love for the kitschiest parts of US Christmas lore. The film’s tone always appears carried by the kind of genuine good naturedness that doesn’t preclude snark but always puts it in the service of heart, and pretty much makes this one of the perfect Christmas movies.

Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman aka 천박사 퇴마 연구소: 설경의 비밀 (2022): Some of the special effects in Kim Seong-sik’s fantasy-tinged horror movie about a scammy shaman (Gang Dong-won) finishing the work of his actual shaman father when called in to exorcise a young girl look pretty much as if taken directly out of a JRPG (I’ve never encountered a KRPG, sorry). Otherwise, this is a fun, if not terribly deep, film with a couple of fun set pieces – there’s a glorious scene where our hero has to fight off a series of possessed people while fleeing through a village with our female lead (Esom). It’s a basic story told efficiently and effectively, and carries itself with a general satisfactory air of an unfussy, straightforward genre piece done well.

The Abandoned aka Cha wu ci xin (2022): This Taiwanese serial killer thriller by Ying-Ting Tseng is at its best whenever it focusses on calm, careful character work, observing its handful of depressed core characters (particularly Janine Chun-Ning Chang) when confronted with an especially nasty series of murders on female itinerant immigrant workers and these characters’ various degrees of guilt. Whenever the film drifts in the direction of more traditional thriller scenes it can’t help but feel derivative of the hundreds of movies and TV shows that have gone through the same sort of material.

Until it arrives at its final act, that’s not happening terribly often, but once the film reaches its climax, one can’t help but think one is watching a film that’s losing sight of its best qualities in favour of a mediocre riff on tropes we’ve seen a hundred times before done better.

Black Invitation (1969)

Original title: 黑帖

China, the outskirts of the Martial World, where a gang of mediocre bullies is a major threat. After four years of wandering, major servant’s son Nian Zhu (Pai Ying) returns to the community he left for reasons of broken hearts and personal dignity. He doesn’t appear to come back with anything more than the shirt he left in on his back and a somewhat ratty looking umbrella. In truth, Nian Zhu has learned rather awesome kung fu, but has taken his master’s lessons about not using violence to heart so deeply, he’ll go out of his way to hide his abilities. That’ll cost a lot of people, obviously.

But really, how much kung fu does a man need to reconnect with his father (Kao Ming) and the lady love (Han Hsiang-Chin) who waited for him – and who is the adoptive daughter of his father’s patrician boss?

Turns out quite a bit of kung fu, for our protagonist’s old home is under threat from a group of bandits living and working in the nearby hills. Said bandits have been terrorizing the local communities for some time now. Their modus operandi is to send out the titular “black invitations” with their money and rich people’s daughters and mistresses wish list, and come down hard on anyone resisting. Apart from the kind of kung fu that’d get them kicked off the movie early in many another kung fu film, the bad guys also utilize the least subtle spy available, traitorous, not the least bit suspicious Wan Ren-Mei (Wan Chung-Shan).

Somehow, it will take a whole movie to take these guys down, with a couple of kidnappings and the usual scenes of the non-violent hero getting tortured before that blissful state of ass-kicking can be achieved.

In some regards, Chou Hsu-Chiang’s Taiwanese martial arts movie Black Invitation feels as if it were a predecessor to the thoughtful mid-period style of the great King Hu. It is at least much more concerned with philosophical concerns and the personal drama of Nian Zhu’s past and relationships than with pulling the audience from one fight to the next. In the early stages of the film, this works rather well, partially because Pai Ying very capably embodies the emotional weight of a world-weary homecoming through every expression and movement. There’s an effective sense of melancholia running through the early parts of the film, of lives not lived to their best, and certainly not their fullest, of youthful idealism getting ground down by a world that simply doesn’t care.

The more the film needs to integrate its more traditional wuxia plot, the less interesting it becomes. Not because there’s anything wrong with integrating the emotional-philosophical with the martial arts tropes, but because the film’s martial arts elements never really convince. The villains are less than impressive, so much so they never feel like the threat everybody around treats them as.

Worse, the martial arts scenes have a couple or three fun ideas, but their execution is much below what you can expect from a Taiwanese film of this era. It is difficult to say if the choreography (apparently by Pai Ying himself) is the problem, for Chou cuts away from all moments of impact and stages every single action scene in a way that hides forms, postures, and movement, as if this were an early 80s low budget martial arts movie made in the US.

This is particularly frustrating because the first one and a half acts are fine indeed, the melodrama perhaps a little stiff but the film’s approach to its protagonist’s plight genuinely moving; the rest of Black Invitation however, leaves much to be desired.

Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981)

aka The Thrilling Sword

aka Heaven Sword

Original title: 神劍動山河

When his wife dies giving birth to a red, oval, pulsating flesh egg, the ruling king of wherever this takes place (Chin Han) decides to get rid of the thing by doing the old Moses bit. The egg (cocoon?) finds its way to The Seven Dwarfs of the Happy Forest (seriously) who quickly learn there’s a healthy human baby girl inside of the fleshy exterior. They decide to raise her as their daughter.

Seventeen years later, our heroine (I believe the delightfully named Fanny Fang Fang-Fang) has grown up to be beautiful, morally pure, and so on. She becomes involved in her birth father’s business again by fate: meeting a heroic prince (Liu Shang-Chien) of the king’s realm and falling in love with him are one. Her feelings are reciprocated, and things could be set for a very quick happy end, if not for the fact that the king has invited two heroic exorcists to his court who are actually a couple of evil, devil worshipping magicians. These two are trying to usurp his throne by all means necessary, after having won the king’s trust by beating monsters they have conjured up themselves and by attacking his counsellors in front of him. Turning heroic princes into embarrassed looking bears, mind-controlling lost daughters and other acts of bizarre fiendishness are all in the program. Fortunately there’s help for the lovers: apart from the dwarfs, who are actually transformed generals, there’s a tiny, magic-wielding fairy willing to go out of her way to help, as well as a ridiculous looking sword that shoots laser beams (paired with an equally ridiculous looking armour), and other whacky nonsense.

Apparently, this Taiwanese fantasy wuxia variant of Snow White (or a Taiwanese version of the same folk tale model) directed by Chang Hsin-Yi is meant as a kids movie. This certainly tracks with other kids movies from the country I’ve encountered, seeing as it is both inexplicable and weird, and seems to be made for the kind of kids you probably wouldn’t want to encounter in the dark. Or really by day – they might shoot laser beams at you.

The whole thing is a WTF movie of the highest degree: it makes its folk tale sources as weird as possible (as if folk tales weren’t already strange enough), adding inexplicable flourishes, scenes of the kind of goofy nonsense some grown-ups believe kids find funny, bits and pieces of other popular fantasy movies – apart from Hong Kong, Chinese sources and Disney, I bet somebody here has seen their share of Harryhausen films and peplum – and random stuff whose reason to be in the movie – or anywhere else - is dubious and inexplicable (in the sense of “please, don’t explain”).

There are so many questions here, from the obvious, “what’s with the horrifying looking chicken bird/whatever muppet pet the dwarfs keep?” to more exalted ones like “why do the devil icons with the lightbulb eyes our baddies converse with have additional mouths in their crotches?”, or “where does a bear costume so bad, it looks actually embarrassed by itself even come from?”.

The movie is certainly not going to answer them, and I’m a little afraid to speculate. It is easier, and certainly more entertaining, to just let the film wash over one’s psyche like radiation. Very possibly, joy will sprout from your brain, like a flower in a Clark Ashton Smith story, when you realize the magic mirror from the folk tale has been replaced by a devil statue talking through its crotch mouth, or encounter the frog person sirens and their buddy the mini-Rodan while our prince is on his quest, or simply try to keep up with bizarre leaps of logic and genre.

Added bonus joys are an awesome needle-dropped score, special effects that clearly care not a whit about how ridiculous they look, and so become impressive in their ridiculousness, a plot that can’t help but do everything, even a simple hero’s quest, as weirdly as possible, and direction that really goes out of its way to make everything look as weird as it should be.

Chess Boxing Matrix (1989)

aka Chivalric Tornado

aka Labyrinth of Death

aka Vampire Strikes Back

Original title: 小俠龍捲風

Seven hundred years before the start of the main narrative, a character that appears to be called Sword God or Sword Master but is very clearly female (Ti Yu-Neung), traps one Evil king (who is indeed as not very nice as his name promises) in some sort of magical contraption that also connects him to a family of jiang shi. After a thousand years, the jiang shi will apparently be purified and allowed to go on to something better.

Because watching people squirm below movie laser shows for a thousand years would get a bit boring eventually, the jing shi and Evil king are freed three hundred years too early. Evil king, not surprisingly given his name, does start in on a new reign of terror, subjugating random weirdos with his laser shooting eyes. His first goal is to get ahold of the little boy of the jiang shi family, for the Sword God has deposited some sort of magical sword in the bad guy’s heart that only the little boy can melt or something.

A group of, mostly kid, heroes does come together to fight Evil king and his minions, while the jiang shi child says “pa-paaaaaaa” a lot.

This bit of Taiwanese martial arts/wuxia/what the hell madness may or may not be meant as a piece of children’s fantasy – the humour and the protagonists suggest as much – but one can’t help but worry about what any child would make of this series of fights, fights, laser shows, non-sequiturs and utter weirdness. Probably art.

For most of the time, this grown-up viewer had only the slightest idea of what was going on, who any of these people were, and what the hell they thought they were doing – a state of affairs certainly not helped by the sort of classic Hongkong and Taiwanese subtitles that seem to have been written by someone who does understand neither Mandarin nor English. Though, to be fair, I don’t think getting more detailed exposition would make this thing more explicable, seeing as how director Wang Chih-Cheng doesn’t like scenes of people talking for more than twenty seconds, and basically runs from one fight full of cheap and cheery visual effects of the good old drawn on lasers and other colourful explosions type to the next, with characters popping in and out of places and scenes seemingly at random. Most of the time, things are very weird indeed, so weird that stiff-armed jiang-shi kung fu and the running “gag” in which Mother Jiang-Shi gets sexually aroused during various fights hardly register on the strangeness scale. A lot of this comes so fast, so furious and with so little sense of control at you, it becomes hard to even describe much of that stuff without becoming reduced to making infantile noises.

So let’s just say that this movie contains a scene where a little boy jiang-shi plays torero (complete with a little red cape) against a gentlemen in a costume which at once suggests a ram and a train (what with smoke coming out of the ears and from the horns), only to get rudely interrupted by an evil tree person. If that doesn’t scream quality, I don’t know what does.

But seriously, while Chess Boxing Matrix makes not a lick of sense, is of dubious taste and has all the dramatic instincts of, well, a ram, it is a pretty incredible experience when a viewer is in the right mood; specifically if that mood is one where you only want to look at lots of backflips, Taiwanese people jumping and kicking non-stop for ninety minutes, and whatever weird flourish the filmmakers come up next to make one minute of non-stop fighting distinguishable from the next, all shot and edited with a violent hatred of anything ever standing still.

Three Films Make A Post: World War Two was just ending. World War Murphy is about to begin.

Murphy’s War (1971): When he was on, Peter Yates could be a great director; when he was off he did tend to make at the very least interesting failures. Murphy’s War, a film about an Irish airplane mechanic with an improbable accent despite being played by Peter O’Toole who makes increasingly insane attempts at taking vengeance on a German U-Boat crew right at the end of World War II, lands somewhere in the middle. There are some riveting set pieces, some excellent tender or hard character moments, but the film is also full of scenes that go on far longer than they need to or should. Worse, it never manages to convince me of Murphy’s increasing derangement, never really finds an angle to show his inner life in a way that makes sense. It doesn’t help that the ending jumps gleefully over the line between the heightened intensity and absurdity of an action movie ending and sheer, goofy nonsense.

La muerte del chacal (1984): This mixture of Mexican action cinema standards and giallo and slasher tropes directed by Pedro Galindo III and starring the dynamic facial hair of brother duo Mario and Fernando Almada is not a perfect film by far – it does tend to drag rather a lot in its first half – but it certainly has a couple of really neat ideas. Particularly the way the mid-act plot twist runs against all audience expectations is rather a thing to behold, especially in a film where you’d never expect any such thing to happen.

After this, the film turns full-on slasher, with still a bit too much feet-dragging for its own good, but also some genuinely cool suspense scenes and stylish kills, as well as an awesomely goofy scene in which one Almeda kills a Doberman with his bare hands in a manner so ridiculous, even a dog person might laugh.

Incantation (2022): I know, quite a few people go really nuts about Kevin Ko’s Taiwanese POV horror movie. It is certainly a film made with the highest competence, full of well-timed shocks, with some creepy ideas, but I also find it nearly aggressively derivative of the traditions of J-Horror and creepypasta (its big, obvious plot twist is taken directly from the latter realm). Which does not make it a bad movie, or even an unenjoyable one, but one that’s a bit too much like a clockwork made out of stolen and borrowed parts to truly do something for me.

In short: The Rope Curse (2018)

Original title: Zong xie

Warning: vague spoilers ahead!

Apparently, at least if we can believe the movie at hand, it is custom in Taiwan and certain coastal areas of China to hinder the spirit of someone who has committed suicide by hanging from turning into something dangerous with the help of a ritual. In it the rope (and the spirit bound to it with it, I assume) is transported via a pretty elaborate looking procession towards the sea and burned.

Jiawei (Jason Tsou) and his best buddy (Chu Chung-Heng, I believe) have gotten permission from the buddy’s exorcist uncle (Chen Bor Jeng) to film such a procession for their streaming channel full of creepy stuff, the burning of a the rope a young bride killed herself with. Particularly Jiawei hopes to make it big with this and earn enough money as an internet sensation to not be penniless when he marries his fiancée Shuyi (Kimi Hsia). Why, the buddy has even acquired the, ahem, talents of what he calls a “big tit internet talent” to help in their goal.

Of course, things go very wrong indeed, the rope falling by the wayside unburnt, its curse continuing. And wouldn’t you know it, said “big tit internet talent” is its first new victim. What at first seems somewhat random will eventually turn out to be connected to the bullying-caused suicide of Shuyi’s best friend from high school.

While it isn’t exactly a masterful example of horror from Taiwan, Liao Shih-Han’s The Rope Curse is an often genuinely entertaining film that could have easily improved by not hitting the clichés it needs to work quite as hard as it does. Parts of the portrayal of Shuyi’s dead friend in the flashbacks are particularly problematic, going the old movie route of giving a very pretty girl a bad haircut, ridiculous glasses and a nasty looking rash to make her “ugly”, making it a bit difficult to take exactly those parts of the film completely seriously that should provide its emotional weight. The bullying is certainly nasty to watch (particularly when you have your own experiences with this sort of thing from childhood) but here, too, the film goes to movie-extreme, where showing a bit more restraint could have actually improved the audience’s emotional connection to what should be an actual tragedy instead of plot mechanics.

There’s a lot of this sort of thing in the film, really, characters that are broader than they should be, motivations that never quite come together, and so on. It’s a film that tries to be very emotionally involving but misses the mark because it is so obviously trying so very hard.

However, Liao is pretty good with most of the scenes of the haunting, hiding mediocre special effects below moody lighting and shadow, and often creating a surprisingly spooky mood. The film does make a lot out of its folk horror elements, having a much easier time portraying the logic of tradition than that of human emotions.

Three Films Make A Post: Always Choose Treat

Trick (2019): From time to time, Patrick Lussier’s Trick is a satisfying little contemporary slasher movie, featuring a killer with a not completely uninteresting MO as well as some fun kills. Alas, it is also a terribly messy film, with way too many main characters for its own good, too many elements from other horror sub-genres that don’t fit with each other at all and a plot that wants to become increasingly intricate and twisty but actually only ever gets dumber and needlessly complicated, as so many twisty films do, in the end turning the supernatural slasher into a bit of Scooby Doo affair with added generic social media critique. On the plus side, there’s a long cameo by Tom Atkins as an adorably cantankerous old man, and Omar Epps pretending he’s in a better written movie than he actually is.

Tomie vs Tomie (2007): Despite the fun and intriguing set-up (somewhat based on a storyline from mangaka Junji Ito’s second – I believe - revival of the Tomie character), Tomohiro Kubo’s entry into the Tomie cycle suffers heavily from the fact it’s coming at a point in the franchise when it has become a strictly direct to video cheapo affair. So the budget’s too low for the effects to visualize the crazier stuff from the manga for more than a scene or two, the actors aren’t exactly top notch, and the script has to somehow come up with a way to let everything take place in an apartment set and the inevitable crappy warehouse. Given these circumstances, this isn’t actually a terrible film but it’s also much less than Ito’s creation deserves.

Split of the Spirit (1987): A choreographer (Pauline Wong Siu-Fung) suffering from men trouble and self doubt adds ghostly vengeance seeking possession to her list of problems when she knocks over the ashes of a recently murdered woman.


Fred Tan Hon-Cheung’s Taiwanese horror film doesn’t add all that much new to this specific part of Asian ghost movies – this is pretty much playing out exactly like you’ll expect it to do. However, the film’s well made and never boring. From time to time, there’s even an aesthetically very pleasing moment or two (the film makes quite a bit out of our heroine being a dancer here), and it’s clear that Tan does try to work with the parallels between the living woman and the dead one having been treated very badly, if in different degrees, by the men they loved.

Three Films Make A Post: Great things come in bears.

Mon Mon Mon Monsters aka 報告老師！怪怪怪怪物！(2017): I like grimdark, “Man is the greatest monster of them all”, everything is horrible, everyone is horrible, and so and so forth movies as much as the next guy, but boy, does Taiwanese director/writer Giddens Ko go overboard with that stuff here. The problem when you fill your film with characters with not a single character trait that isn’t horrible, doing horrible things to horrible monsters while being horrible, until things end horribly, is that there really rather seems to be no point at all to proceedings, for when everything and everyone is horrible all of the time, there’s really not much of a conclusion to reach anymore. It’s also rather monotonous and becomes a bit boring quickly. Hell, even serial killers, unlike everyone on screen here, aren’t monsters 24/7. I’ve seen this praised as incisive criticism on the state of The Youth, but this interpretation suggests that every kid is a sociopath or a psychopath, which just isn’t true.

The Witch Files (2018): This – if not officially – POV semi-remake of 90s classic/”classic” (your choice) witchcraft movie The Craft as directed by Kyle Rankin, on the other hand, a film clearly made for a YA audience, is clearly of the opinion that there are indeed problems with The Youth, but most of them are caused by an evil witch, and can be solved with a bit of hocus pocus and teenage girls learning some valuable lessons. Like a lot of contemporary YA cinema, this suffers from a rather lukewarm script; where Mon Mon etc is much too cynical, this one’s just a little too nice to its characters. Otherwise, there’s little here that’s terribly interesting or insightful, the plot developing competently but without any actual surprises.

It’s an okay enough film to while away 90 minutes of your time, mind you, there’s just little substance and only a degree of excitement to be had. The cast is pretty good, though, and I’m looking forward to seeing them in movies that give them a bit more to do.


Don’t Leave Home (2018): I was neither terribly surprised by the plot of this tale of an artist working in diorama form getting invited to the estate of a former Irish priest (Lalor Roddy) and painter who was involved in some possibly supernatural disappearances decades ago. You’ll never guess what the man’s dominating housekeeper (Helena Bereen) and he are actually going to sell. However, director Michael Tully sets up such a fine mood of the strange and the ineffable through landscape shots, creatively staged dream sequences and often ambiguous dialogue, complete originality is not really necessary at all for the film to work. The acting for the three central characters is fine too, and there’s a lot to be said for the intelligent way Tully interweaves his soft horror with elements of the folk tale. I also do appreciate a film that knows how to do something of a happy end that fits well into this particular genre space.

In short: Amazing Stories (1994)

Original title: 野店

This Taiwanese anthology horror film directed by Chin Ao-Hsin clearly shares the goals and aesthetics of the milder Hong Kong CATIII movies by adding quite a bit of female nudity to a trio of at heart traditional Chinese horror tales. Stylistically, the film certainly looks the part, too, for it is full of the kind of camera angles, dolly shots, colours and even performance styles typical of Hong Kong cinema of the time. I suspect this was actually shot for the Hong Kong market more than the Taiwanese one, though I certainly can’t prove it.

In any case, the first story concerns the plight of a young woman and her mentally handicapped brother who have been sold off (married?) to a sadistic prick owning and working a small pre-industrial textile mill – which makes for a very moody and claustrophobic backdrop – who likes to rape and torture the girl. After her brother drowns in an accident, our heroine’s beloved male scholar doll she has owned since she was a little child comes alive turning into a man she actually falls in love with, and who will duel the prick repeatedly. Apart from the awesome mill, this first story has it all: torture, an awkward kung fu duel, a loathsome villain, a cringeworthy portrayal of a mentally handicapped man, as well as consensual sex and a genuinely exciting climax (no, the other one) prick versus burnable doll person. And, you know, a male hero called Baby Doll.

The second story concerns a guy living in some kind of no man’s land digging out the remains of people so their relatives can take them with them when moving away (everybody moves away). He encounters one of yon seductive supernatural women who like to suck out men’s life-force during sex (an idea that, as far as I know, has been a traditional concept in various Chinese culture groups for literal ages). This specific woman even has a reason for this, for in an earlier life, he promised to commit suicide together with her, but changed his mind at the last moment, leaving her unable to ever be reincarnated as a human again. However, when the gravedigger (reverse gravedigger?) was a child, he saved the life of a female badger(?) spirit, who enters into a mild yet pretty fun wire fu duel with the sex sucker. Again, this packs a lot into a short running time, and while Chin’s direction is a bit generic, the genre in question is 90s wire fu with sexy bits of dubious taste, so it’s certainly an enjoyable little tale.


The third and longest story did leave me a bit puzzled, I have to admit. Its set-up is basically The Postman Always Rings Twice situated in civil war China, with some added bits about impotence, but the tale ends in a way I find less than satisfying, leaving exactly the wrong characters alive for the wrong reasons and presenting a plot twist plan that’s so improbable, it could be from a US horror film made in 2018. The tale also asks its audience to buy a not terribly gracefully aged, sixty-year old Tin Ching as the studliest man alive. However, in between, there are quite a few sweaty, claustrophobic moments to witness, so the third episode may be the film’s weakest, but isn’t a total wash.

The Tag-Along (2015)

Original title: 紅衣小女孩

Warning: spoilers are inevitable in this case

Real estate agent Wei (River Wong Hiu) and his talk radio DJ girlfriend Yi-Jun (Tiffany Hsu Wei-Ning) have a rather difficult relationship. She doesn’t want to marry at all while he mortgages his grandma’s house to buy a family apartment for the time after they’re married behind everyone’s backs (somehow, even his grandmother’s), which does not promise a very glorious future to anyone involved.

Things become definitely inglorious when Wei’s grandmother (Liu Yin-Shang) disappears, or rather, as the audience knows, is kidnapped by mountain forest spirits who seem to be putting human souls where once trees stood (or something of that sort), sometimes putting an evil spirit in the place of their victims. The victims can call their loved ones for help, but when those react, they are taken in their stead. It’s a bit of an awkward arrangement, if you ask me, but I’m no forest spirit. Obviously, after a handful of frightening occurrences, Wei takes the place of his grandmother, and Yi-Jun becomes our protagonist.

It falls on her shoulders to save Wei by changing her mind about marriage and children. But hey, at least it’s okay for her to work, it seems.

So yeah, it would take quite a bit of mental gymnastics to call Cheng Wei-Hao’s The Tag-Along anything else but socially conservative (as most Taiwanese films I’ve seen seem to be). Given that my own predilections lie in a rather different direction, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I still enjoyed the film. Certainly, that has a lot to do with the fact that Cheng isn’t out to punish his characters for living the “wrong” way as a lot of explicitly conservative horror is – the film is even willing to let an abortion slide which these films usually never do – but seems more interested in seeing them become happier and ghost-free through marriage and babies. The film seems to genuinely feel for its characters, and while I disagree with what it says is good for them, it does have its heart in the right place.

There’s also an only slightly more subtle aspect to the film’s subtext, in that the spirits are leaving their forest home to harvest souls in the city because the balance of things in their forest has been disturbed by people, only to come to a place where the natural order is just as out of joint. Young people not marrying! Women who don’t want children! OMG!

I…don’t seem to be selling the film very well, am I? But despite its basic message, I do think The Tag-Along is a rather fine horror film that tries to sell its message in an honest way, without being too much of an ass about it and without feeling the need to disrespect the integrity of its characters for its message. Even Yi-Jun’s change of heart when confronted with nasty spirits makes sense for her, so that I didn’t found myself manipulated – at least until the very end when the film’s laying it on much too thick (though that does feed into a kicker ending which you could see as a subversion of the whole conservative message of the film, but that I read as your standard horror movie ending being just that).

The thing is, this is a genuinely good horror movie, a film featuring some simple yet effective ghost scares, CGI that goes from silly to creepy and is charming in both ways, decent acting, as well as one of the ickier bug eating scenes in memory. It’s a film that builds mood and establishes characters and place economically and effectively, as well as one that does understand the special vulnerability you feel just after waking up from a nightmare. I also found the way the protagonist role shifts over time very elegantly realized and organic to the film while still being surprising.

So it would be pretty shabby if I’d look down on The Tag-Along just because I disagree with it on the importance of marriage and babies.

In short: The Bride (2015)

Original title: 屍憶

Apparently, ghost marriages were once a thing in Taiwan (and one supposes in other parts of China, too), a very peculiar bit of patriarchy in action. Unmarried women, you see, don’t properly belong to any man, therefore, in a society that just might have some mild problems with that sort of idea, she won’t get into the better bits of the afterlife or be reincarnated properly. How to solve the problem? Marry that unmarried corpse to a guy in a very particular version of a shotgun wedding.

This information is pertinent to the film at hand, for one of its two protagonists, TV producer Hao (Wu Kang-Ren), has been having nightmares and daymares ever since he’s gotten engaged to his fiancée (Nikki Hsieh Hsin-Ying). In these dreams, he’s pursued by a rotten-faced ghostly woman in a (traditionally red) bridal gown. Worse still, the dead woman’s attentions don’t stay in his dreams but take on rather threatening and spooky form in the real world.

When we don’t follow Hao’s unpleasant adventures in deeply unwanted marriage proposals, we spend some quality time with teenager Yin (Vera Yan Zheng-Lan). Yin has her own ghost troubles, for she’s starting to see ghosts wherever she goes. That’s something that seems to have been a common talent in women of her family in past generations, she’ll later learn; it seems to be her job to quiet the unquiet spirits. For a long time, Hao’s and Yin’s plots seem separate but they’ll converge in the end.

Lingo Hsieh Ting-Han’s The Bride is a fine bit of Asian horror. It’s not exactly deeply original, using most of the types of shocks we know from the last twenty years or so from horror films from places as different as China, Japan and South Korea, though it does replace the more typical long-haired ghost with the hidden face with its – effectively icky – ghost bride for about half of its shocks. Hsieh does use his well-worn material rather effectively, though, using some well-placed shocks and jump scares but clearly preferring the good old feeling of creeping dread; he’s rather good at creating that feeling too, playing sure-handedly with basic human fears.

The director hasn’t just learned the obvious bits from the last twenty years of Asian horror either. He also uses that calm, unhurried way of telling a story, providing more than enough of the creepy stuff on the way but building mood by not confusing his film with a carnival ride. That doesn’t just make the creepy things that do happen that decisive bit more effective (there’s little horrifying in horror films that only ever shout at you, after all, they’re just loud) but also leaves room for characters that are just deep enough to make their fates interesting. Hsieh also manages to use a certain structural trick connected with a plot twist (no, not that one, fortunately) while still playing fair with the audience and not making a film about the plot twist. Given how horrible these things more often than not play out in horror films, that’s probably The Bride’s greatest artistic success.

That it is also a traditional but effective and engaging bit of horror nearly seems beside the point in comparison.

Three Films Make A Post: HEXED BY THE EVIL EYE

The Scarlet Coat (1955): Like many of director John Sturges's films, this one about Cornel Wilde acting as a double agent during the US Revolutionary War and about the Arnold Conspiracy, is a more complex and emotionally grown-up film than one would expect. If most of the media concerning said Revolution you've consumed has been made during the last thirty years or so, you might also be delighted to find a film that doesn't treat the British as baby-eating Satanists and the Americans as glorious, flawless angels.

In fact, most of the film's complexity lies in its treatment of morals and ideals as a rather more personal thing; being in the right is complicated. Here, idealism depends on the beholder, and cruel and wrong things can and will be done for the best of causes. Added to this - really very spy movie-like - view of the world is dialogue that regularly reminds more of a film noir in its sharpness, and some fine acting by Wilde and Michael Wilding. The film gets a bit too morally upright and sentimental in the end for my tastes but it's much too interesting to ignore.

Green Jade Statuette aka Killer's Game aka Fists of Vengeance (1978): Lee Tso-Nam's movie falls under the thankless bracket of "just another decent Taiwanese martial arts film". Even though there's nothing to write home about except for the film's borrowing from certain Spaghetti Western soundtracks and - wonderfully - an orchestral version of "Greensleaves" for a moment right at its end, it's still an entertaining enough watch full of not inspired but professional fights, martial arts smack talk philosophy (one of the differences between Asian and Western action films is that Asian ones at least try to sound profound), and rather random twists and turns. It's fun enough.

Lupin III: Farewell to Nostradamus (1995): Speaking of films that don't move away from their genre base even one inch, this anime is exactly what you'd expect from a Lupin III movie (which are a genre for themselves), with characters you either love (you are a wonderful human being) or hate (I say thee nay), going through the usual hectic and over-blown adventures. Lupin is generally not at all about originality but about frenetic and loving execution and fulfilled expectations. Usually, I'd criticize the series for playing it safe, but when it's one of its better episodes/movies/OVAs like Farewell, I'm much too occupied with enjoying myself for that sort of thing.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,taiwanese movies,japanese movies,spies,adventure,martial arts,anime,sf,comedy,cornel wilde,john sturges

In short: Zombie 108 (2012)

aka Z108
(Warning: I may have to curse a bit during the course of this write-up, because this film is way too fucking horrible not to)

The good news: this is supposed to be Taiwan's first zombie movie. Good for you, Taiwan! It can only get better from here.

The bad news: Everything else, for Taiwan's first zombie movie just happens to be utter shite.

But let's begin with the film's plot, which would be easier if director and writer Joe Chie Jen-Hao had deigned to include one. As it stands, we're witness to another zombie outbreak, this time around caused by a scientist (the fiend!) "inventing a new gene". Zombie 108 takes place in one of the rougher districts of Taipei. Various gangsters and SWAT members run circles through it, fleeing zombies in an attempt to, um, you got me there. From time to time, their running around is intercut with the adventures of a guy wearing what I think is supposed to be a mask made of human skin like Leatherface, lovingly called Pervert (Joe Chie Jen-Hao himself - oh the irony!), who keeps a bunch of women who - like all the actresses in the movie - look as if they rose from the same model clone tank in his cellar for easy rape and torture access, or rather, so that the camera can leer at them in just about the only shots in the film that aren't filmed by a director of photography with the shakes. After a lot of running around and getting killed, the cops and robbers survivors land in Pervert's apartment. And that's supposed to be the plot.

Apart from that whole not actually having a plot angle, and being sleazy in a manner unpleasant yet not very interesting, Zombie 108 also recommends itself for the garbage heap by not including any characterisation to speak of. The film clearly prefers to spend its time showing off all of the most unpleasant stylistic tics of contemporary cinema (while leaving its strengths out, of course), so there's the usual desaturated look where all colours have been replaced with urine yellow and vomit green, editing and camerawork so nervous and hyperactive it's usually impossible to make out what's going on on screen - doubly so in action sequences, of course, because if the audience could see what the fuck is going on, there the production would actually have to put an effort into choreographing them, employ stuntmen or equally insane things like that -, "comedy" that's closer to a lobotomy than humour (oh look, Pervert uses zombies doing the Conan wheel bit in miniature to create electricity, hurr, hurr), and various mildly tasteless attempts to shock the audience by breaking so-called taboos that could work if the film ever bothered to actually create any emotional connection between what's happening on screen and its audience. Or if this didn't look like a second-grade Marilyn Manson video clip. That, again, would of course take an actual effort by the filmmakers beyond shaking the camera and shouting, and we surely can't have that.

In other words, this piece of shit is the worst fucking thing I've seen this year; yes, even worse than Nazis at the Centre of the Earth.

Technorati-Markierungen: taiwanese movies,joe chie jen-hao,horror,in short,crap

Three Films Make A Post: The girls do exactly what you think they do!

Female Chivalry (1975): This Taiwanese martial arts comedy directed by Yeung Jing-Chan is mostly playing the cheap variation of its genre by the book. It's still more entertaining than I'd have expected thanks to Chia Ling's (you may knows her as Judy Lee) performance: she kicks people around with great conviction, she smirks as if her character knew she were a nameless roguish heroine in a silly martial arts movie and approved of that particular lot in life, and she looks pretty smashing in men's clothing. That's more than enough to not only carry the film but drag it up a notch or three in quality and win my heart for ninety minutes.

Der Tod im Roten Jaguar (1968) aka Death in the Red Jaguar: There's a minor series of films based on German "Heftroman" (which are a little like post-war pulps, but different in ways generally making them inferior - I'll explain someday, if I ever find a more interesting film based on one) hero Jerry Cotten (in the movies played by the sleeping pill medicine knows as George Nader), working for an FBI that has as little to do with the original as the German Edgar Wallace movie adaptation Scotland Yard has with the real one. Cotten's adventures usually take place in a not-New York that's unreal in similar, yet less interesting, ways to the Wallace movies not-London; Der Tod mostly takes place in not-San Francisco.

Despite being directed by Harald Reinl who was generally pretty great at pulpy thrills, Der Tod contains a bit too much of the typical provincial stink of German genre film, and way too little that could lead to actual excitement. In fact, watching the film, one can't help but think the film is actively trying not to be too exciting, or weird, or funny, instead aiming for the boring middle ground for no discernible reason beyond the idea that a good German bourgeois is in love with the concept of the "middle ground".

Vessel (2012): This little SF/horror movie directed by Clark Baker, on the other hand, packs more excitement into its thirteen minute running time than can be found in a whole Cotten movie. Clearly, you can still use airplanes and tentacular aliens and a certain Twilight Zone episode for good.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: taiwanese movies,german movies,american movies,martial arts,crime,horror,sf,in short,yeung jing-chan,chia ling,harald reinl,george nader,clark baker

In short: The Lady Constables (1978)

The fiendish men of the Black Wind Fortress steal a set of pearls known as the Night-Shining Pearls, slaughtering the escorts protecting them in the process. Because the Pearls belong to Prince Cheng (whoever he is), the bandits' leader, either called Coldwater or Coldstar Tiger (depending on if you believe the subtitles or the HKMDB), in any case played by Chang Yi, disbands the group; the Pearls are divided between Tiger and his four sub-chiefs.

Some time later, three heroes begin stalking the former Black Wind Fortress members. There's the (lady) constable Tien Ying Hung (Angela Mao being Angela Mao, which is more than enough for me) who is the straightforwardly temperamental type. Tang Lin (Chia Ling), a lady who is looking for vengeance for the murdered escorts. She likes to play with coffins and home-made torture devices and is something of a charming psychopath. Prince Cheng's bodyguard Hung Yi (Wong Goon-Hung) has his orders and doesn't like to talk, so he's only communicating via little pre-written scrolls which just happen to always have the right content - or so I assume, for the (of course often terrible and unreadable) subtitles don't bother with his messages, so I found myself bound to think whatever he's saying with them must be as supremely sarcastic as his face is unmoving.

The three don't really team up, instead opting for trying to outwit and outrace each other to the black fortress people whenever possible. In the end, one of the three always ends up torturing one of the Black Wind Fortress chiefs while the others come in a minute later, only for all three to get distracted by something and their victim to end up dead by unknown hands (oh, whoever might it be?). Yes, our heroes are torturers and idiots.

Still, how difficult can it be to work through a bunch of bad guys and get some pearls back?

I don't really know why Cheung San-Yee's Taiwanese wuxia is called "The Lady Constables", seeing as it does only contain one actual lady constable, but I have to say the slight loopiness of that fact fits the slight loopiness of everything else about the film well enough. Now, The Lady Constables is not a true piece of weird fu - it's just not weird enough for that - and rather a relatively straightforward wuxia film that can't completely escape the natural tendency of a film of its genre and its era to always drift toward strangeness. So while there's nothing even close to a scene of a little person riding a giant and spraying acid from his goitre, the film still has its weird moments, like Chia Ling's coffin fixation, that whole "I'm not mute, but I still only communicate with tiny scrolls that even have their own sound effect" business, the metal armours that look like metal space suits the bodyguards of one of the chiefs wear (and which are of course beaten with a big magnet), the other bodyguards whose kung fu is based on standing in a leg-up, or Coldstar Tiger's umbrella of doom. It's not mind-blowing stuff if you're used to Taiwanese wuxia madness, but it's imaginative enough to help the characteristically basic plot stay interesting; a sense of whimsy goes a long way.

Cheung San-Yee's direction is nothing special either: he really likes to zoom in and out and in and out, keeps everything in focus and the characters in the shot, and that's about it as far as his direction goes. It's serviceable enough, which is exactly the thing I'd say about the fight choreography too.

There's nothing to make me go "oooh!" about The Lady Constables, yet also nothing that's disappointing or boring.

Technorati-Markierungen: taiwanese movies,in short,cheung san-yee,angela mao,chia ling,wong goon-hung,wuxia

In short: Snuff-Bottle Connection (1977)

The peaceable and humble China is again threatened by dastardly foreigners. Because no buck-toothed Japanese could be found, and the British are busy wondering who that Wong Fei Hung is (the devil?), it's time for the Russian menace (in form of guys in vaguely "Russian" clothes speaking English with fake Russian accents, of course) to arrive. Seems like the Russians are trying to somehow acquire ports that won't freeze in winter, and send a certain Colonel Tolstoy (Roy Horan) to China, supposedly as a diplomat, but in truth to conspire with Chinese traitors, when he's not writing really long books, I suppose.

The Emperor's officials aren't sleeping on the job, though, and send out their excellent agent Shao Ting Shang (John Liu Chung-Liang) to ferret out the traitors and get rid of the Russians. Shao for his part knows that he could use an expert knife thrower to conquer Tolstoy's horrible modern pistols, and so seeks the help of his friend, the kind-hearted rogue Kao (Yip Fei-Yang), who is perfectly willing to put his life on the line for Emperor and country. Kao comes complete with his own kid sidekick, the frighteningly agile Xiao Do Sze (Wong Yat-Lung). This being a Taiwanese movie, the child might very well be doomed.

Together, the trio kicks, punches and perforates through masses of henchmen until a pair of valuable snuff bottles the conspirators use for identification and the obscure snake-hawk fighting style some of their enemies prefer leads them to the brain behind the traitorous operation, General Shantung (Hwang Jang-Lee in the obligatory white wig). Then it's time for more kicking and punching.

Snuff-Bottle Connection (directed by Dung Gam-Woo and Lily Lau Lap-Lap) won't go down in the annals of martials arts cinema as a movie doing anything of interest with its plot, its characters, or its drama. One could in fact argue that the film is slight in these respects even by the rather loose standards of martial arts cinema, seeing as it does not even try to make its plot look complicated, does not contain character development that I'd know of (I'm not even sure it contains characters, now that I think about it), and only goes for the simplest ways of affecting its audience emotionally - patriotism and the killing of children.

In this film, plot is something you only need to string your fighting sequences together, and the film really contains a lot of fights.

Fortunately, much of the fighting is really pretty darn great thanks to performances of a cast of kung fu cinema experts and the action direction of the great Yuen Wo-Ping. Snuff-Bottle Connection's fights aren't among Yuen's most creative works (this film was made in the year before Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle's Shadow would let Yuen come fully into his own), but they are already acrobatic, fast, and done with a loving eye for detail. It's a bit like witnessing the point where Yuen turns from a good action choreographer to the guy who reinvented part of the body language of martial arts cinema.

As an added bonus, Yuen is also able to do the nearly unthinkable in Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema, and lets the white guys look relatively good in fights (an ability that would much later surface again when the poor man had to make immovable objects like Keanu Reaves look lively).

So, while there's really nothing about Snuff-Bottle Connection except for the fighting, the fighting's so swell that theoretically film-destroying problems aren't much of a problem in reality.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: taiwanese movies,martial arts,dung gam-woo,lily lau lap-lap,yuen woo-ping,john liu chung-liang,hwang jang-lee,yip fei-yang,in short