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.

The Angry River (1971)

The martial world is struck by a series of cowardly attacks with poison darts. A large part of the survivors of the good clans meets up in the castle of the Lan to discuss how to find the perpetrator of the dastardly deeds.

The poisoner is no sloth, though, and attacks Master Lan right in his own castle, leaving the man on his deathbed. His only hope for survival is something called the Black Herb, a magically potent remedy that can only be found in Soul Valley.

The few martial artists who volunteer for the long and arduous journey to retrieve the Black Herb barely make it out of the castle's door before their hidden enemy strikes and kills them, until Master Lan's daughter Lan Feng (a very young Angela Mao) is the only fighter capable, willing and left standing.

The tough young woman has to trek through some of the more dangerous parts of China. with unsubtle but fitting names like the Angry River (a better name for it would have been "The Explody River", by the way) or the Merciless Pass, while fighting off the thugs and goons Poison Dart (Pai Ying) sends after her. Using a judicious amount of martial arts and willpower, Lan Feng overcomes these obstacles and arrives at her destination. Arriving at Soul Valley turns out to be not enough, though.

The resident hermit (I think played by Fung Ngai) insists on his visitors going through another series of tests (including a short but awesome tyrannosaurus rhino fight). Lan Feng doesn't do too well here, but the hermit is impressed enough by her courage and daughterly sense of duty that he offers her a dose of the Herb if she allows him to rob her of her martial powers. Being the good daughter that she is, the heroine agrees.

Now in possession of the herb, Lan Feng "only" has to return back home without any way to overcome anything more dangerous than a fly in combat and in the possession of a magical herb that not only heals all known poisons but can also be used to double a person's martial prowess. It's not difficult to imagine that there is quite a lot of people willing to kill for the possession of something like this, and soon Lan Feng is on the run from every thug and bad guy around.

Her toughness and intelligence will have to be enough to help her out of more than one tight spot. Fortunately, she also meets the chivalrous swordsman Leng Yu-Han (Kao Yuen) who is more than willing to lend her a hand and his sword.

The Angry River is an early Golden Harvest production with a very young Angela Mao in the lead, and there are more than enough people on the net willing to tell you that it is not an especially interesting or worthwhile film, being made some time before the production house's and the actress' prime.

I'll have to disagree with that quite a bit. Sure, the plot is bog-standard wuxia fare, but - as is so often the case with genre films - its qualities are lying in the execution of well-known elements.

And when it comes to the execution, there's not much I don't find praiseworthy (or, if not praiseworthy, then at least charming) about The Angry River. Mao's performance is not a subtle one, but it is as intense and enthusiastic as one could wish for, making the young and rather headstrong (in a good way) heroine the center of the film even when the script doesn't always trust her to be. The rest of the acting is solid throughout, the fighting performances are energetic, while the fights themselves are about as creatively choreographed as one expects (and sometimes surprisingly bloody).

What really makes the film though is Wong Fung's direction. When he is not overusing the camera's zoom lens, he's occupied with some spectacularly framed location shots, using natural light as beautifully as anyone I can think of, with nary a moment that isn't gorgeous in one way or the other.

But friends of cave sets (and who likes swordplay movies and isn't!?) won't be too disappointed. There is a short yet sweet scene in a rather pretty flower cave with pool and dinosaur that somehow fits tonally quite well into the less artificial looking world that makes up the rest of the film.

Most of the time, The Angry River is a semi-realistic wuxia film with only slight supernatural elements, but there are some short bursts of the sort of moments you'd usually find in a Weird Fu movie (yes, the dinosaur thing again, but also interesting geography like the Angry River itself), giving the film a judicious amount of spice.

It is really a rather exciting film, but one I find relatively difficult to write up as enthusiastically as it deserves, because it mostly does what you'd expect of a film of its type and period. It just does it exceedingly well.

So, if you are at all interested in wuxia movies, there's just no excuse not to grab the dirt cheap Joy Sales DVD and have some fun.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,angela mao,wong fung,wuxia,reviews,kao yuen