Three Shaw Brothers Wuxia Make A Post

The Silver Fox aka 玉面飛狐 (1968): You can read many, if not most, wuxia as tales of family tragedy, and there’s little more tragic than a Dad who dresses up like a Chinese Phantom of the Opera while mourning your lost Mum and training you as his budding supervillain assistant. Despite this, our heroine Ching Ching aka Silver Fox (Lily Ho Li-Li) does appear to prefer roguish tricksterdom to more po-faced vengeance (until the climax, of course), which leads to a number of delightful scenes of Ho crossdressing as her own, imaginary brother, complex poison and antidote schemes, and many a moment of her and her romantic angle/theoretical enemy flirting by attempting to outwit one another. All of which does make a curious contrast to the more Gothic trappings of the film’s final act, but certainly doesn’t make those any less fun.

The only minor let-down is that director Hsu Tseng-Hung isn’t quite as fun a director as his material deserves.

Village of Tigers aka 惡虎村 (1971): Speaking of not quite as fun, for large parts of its running time this Yueh Hua (who is Elliott Ngok?)/Shu Pei-Pei vehicle about a bland attempt at framing an honourable martial artist for murder as directed by Griffin Yueh Feng and Wong Ping is about the most middle of the road wuxia film imaginable. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the movie: Yueh Hua is as always perfectly serviceable, Shu Pei-Pei convinces in a rare action role, and everybody involved is an experienced professional who was made this sort of film well for a decade or two. The choreography is fine, as well. Yet there’s also very little that’s actually interesting, or weird, or truly fun, or truly involving.

Until, that is, the climax arrives, and things turn into an actual battle between two opposing martial artist forces that’s so great, it seems to come from a totally different movie.

Dragon Swamp aka 毒龍潭 (1969): And with this Lo Wei movie, we’re with the wuxia at its most fantasy-adjacent, full of things like giant lizards, rubber masks that can literally make Cheng Pei-Pei look like Tung Li, green-glowing swords and the kind of complex worldbuilding that suggests you’ve somehow stumbled into the third novel of ten of a generation-spanning fantasy epic. Once the confusion settles, enjoyment can’t help but set in at the mix of increasingly imaginative fights, high emotional stakes and pure imagination. Further attractions are Cheng Pei-Pei in a double role at three different ages, Yueh Hua (him again) being very upright, and Lo Lieh in one of his not completely evil villain roles – which I always prefer to his total bastards, as much as I enjoy those.

Three Films Make A Post: For Howard, things are about to get R'lyeh crazy.

Thir13en Ghosts (2001): The title is program in this attempt by Steve Beck to remake one of William Castle’s weakest films. I don’t know why you’d want to remake that one, but here it is.

Becks’s film is not very good, featuring music video-style ghosts not doing terribly much beyond hunting the main characters through corridors. To be fair, these are rather better looking corridors than usual in corridor runners but the decision to keep the body count low in a film that features nothing else beyond the ghost effects to keep the audience awake seems rather dubious to me. There’s really not much else to say here: Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham doesn’t put any effort into his villainous turn, the rest of the cast is okay, and there’s nothing memorable at all going on.

Goldstone (2016): Ivan Sen’s sequel to his Australian rural crime movie Mystery Road on the other hand is just brilliant, again telling much of its story through the landscape it takes place in (which is also part of its philosophical argument), letting Aaron Pedersen say very much through saying very little, and again talking about the way little corruptions turn into big ones, the price of looking away, and why one might want to despair at the world but perhaps shouldn’t. It also happens to get close to breaking my heart in the process. Sen displays a keen sense of the way people tell themselves stories about the world and their places in it to justify any petty, evil act they commit but also some hard-won hope.

There’s some great filmmaking, great writing, and great acting (besides Pedersen, there are fine turns by among others Jacki Weaver, Cheng Pei-Pei and Alex Russell) on display here, too.

Shadows of the Dead (2016): John Ross’s film about a bunch of teens and their struggle against a shadow demon thing, is the sort of undemanding streaming service queue/SyFy Channel fodder one can watch with a mild degree of enjoyment on a day when one feels very undemanding oneself. Thus one can feel very mildly entertained by it and then forget about it completely. With a bit of work, this could have been a more interesting film: sharper characterisation of the protagonists, or a monster with less random powers, or hallucinations of the characters’ greatest fear with a bit more heft and thought to them are all things that come to mind immediately that could have made the film less bland.