Heroes of the East (1978)

aka Shaolin Challenges Ninja

aka Shaolin vs. Ninja

aka Drunk Shaolin Challenges Ninja

Original title: 中華丈夫

Hongkong businessman’s son Ho To (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) has come of age. This means he is bound to marry the daughter of a long-time Japanese business partner of his father, in a marriage arranged when the victims were still kids. Ho To’s not best pleased. However, things turn less gloomy for the groom when said daughter, Yumiko (Yuka Mizuno), turns out to be rather on the attractive side. Even better, the young couple do hit it off rather nicely, and things seem set for a great marriage with attractive, bilingual kids.

Alas, both of the newlyweds turn out to be rather fanatical martial artists. Instead of bonding over this shared interest, they focus on cultural differences and short tempers. Ho To thinks Japanese martial arts rather unladylike, while Yumiko clearly finds her husband’s kung fu a bit girlie. Quite a bit of physical fighting between the irascible couple ensues, until Ho To manages to insult Yumiko and the whole of Japanese martial arts, and she flees back to Japan in anger.

Following the advice of his dumbest servant, Ho To then decides to lure his wife back to Hongkong by writing her a challenge letter in which he further insults Japanese martial arts. Thanks to a former admirer of Yumiko, who is also her ninjutsu teacher, that letter lands in the hands of the grandmaster of a school for all kinds of Japanese martial arts, who, keeping with the short tempers of everyone in the movie, does not like what he reads there. Thus instead of a penitent or even more angry wife, a whole horde of masters of various martial arts arrive from Japan on his doorstep, and Ho To will have to beat every single one of them without causing the martial arts version of an international incident. On the plus side, Yumiko returns without wanting to fight.

There is really very little about Lau Kar-Leung’s Heroes of the East that isn’t awesome in one way or the other. Really, the only thing I don’t like about this tale of marriage troubles caused by some of the hardest heads in romance/martial arts is that the set-up leaves no room for the Japanese martial artists to win a bout or two against Ho To. But then, unlike most Hongkong movies, Heroes of the East does not portray the Japanese as bucktoothed villains, instead giving them and their particular martial arts cultures respect, and the fighters personalities – of course mostly expressed via fighting styles. Even better, the Japanese characters are actually portrayed by Japanese martial artist actors, so the Chinese vs Japanese martial arts are a bit more than Hongkong actors imitating Japanese fighting.

Instead, Lau’s fight choreography finds particular joy in the match-ups of the most artistic versions of culturally differently coded fighting styles, putting such an impressive amount of thought and intelligence into making every single fight different and inspired, one will hardly even notice that what starts as a martial arts romantic comedy turns into a series of fight set pieces.

But then, as is only proper and correct for martial arts cinema, there’s actually quite a lot expressed through the fighting. One of the movie’s subtler points is how much Ho To grows by having to level up his kung fu against so many accomplished fighters, acquiring a poise, dignity and politeness that is directly expressed through the changes in his fighting style. With these traits he could of course have avoided the whole marital malaise completely if he’d only already had them when squabbling with his wife.

Even though the film unfortunately spends very little time on her in the later proceedings, it is clear that Yumiko goes through a comparable process of personal growth, less by having to fight it out, but by watching her friends and her husband putting themselves through an ordeal for little more than angry words.

F for Fake (1973)

Hired to take over/make use of the bare bones of a documentary made by François Reichenbach about art forger and general high living faker Elmyr de Hory and his biographer and semi-professional liar Clifford Irving, Orson Welles starts having a bit of fun, turning the material into a meditation on art and reality, the nature of forgery, the flim-flam elements of his own particular talents, and takes an opportunity to show off his late life partner Oja Kodar  – in a very unreconstructed kind of way you really wouldn’t encounter anymore these days, very much for better and for worse.

Also involved are thoughtful moments of Orson – in his role as one of the great and wonderful hams of the screen - hamming it up considerably when the opportunity for a monologue arises (or whenever he simply fancies doing one), some moments of “high art” theatre, and a dirty story about great painter made particularly funny via a combination of “look how hot my girlfriend is!” and Michel Legrand’s score going full softcore soundtrack on us.

All of this is very Orson Welles in many aspects. Welles treats the project as yet another opportunity to show off his – considerable – intelligence and his – hardly in need of an adjective - talents – real and imagined. On paper, this should be a rather unpleasant watch – Orson holding forth to his friends with a glass of wine or three, Orson showing magic tricks, Orson talking up his girlfriend, Orson wearing his favourite hat, and so on, and so forth. In practice, like most of the man’s weirder projects, there’s a genuine charm to film and man. Sure, he’s full of himself, but he also appears to approach his audience as people who are on his own level (up in the stratosphere, at least), whom he invites to think about a couple of things, to have various very diverse kinds of fun with him, to listen to interesting people tell even more interesting lies and truths, and to present us with a last run-through of what Orson Welles was all about.

Only the very disagreeable would disagree with this approach, and only the much too serious would not be caught up in Welles’s charm. I for one don’t want to be any of these things, at least this evening.

Three Films Make A Post: Children can be such monsters.

Abigail (2024): In Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillet’s new directorial outing, yet another hapless gang of criminals (among them characters played by Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kevin Duran and Kathryn Newton) kidnaps a little girl (Alisha Weir) that turns out be rather more dangerous than anyone could have expected.

Once the kid vampire ballerina is revealed, things turn into the typical chase through a mildly creepy location, with a couple of decent twists and betrayals added to the mix. It’s all decent enough, but also not terribly creative on the scripting level: Barrera’s character, for example, is supposed to be the likeable one because she has a child she loves and hesitates about five seconds when it comes to kidnapping another child, which assumes an audience willing to cut a pretty face rather a lot of slack. Fun fact: Hitler really loved dogs.

I’m also less than enthused about the movie’s absolute fixation on that vampire ballerina thing, something that stops to be as funny or creepy as the filmmakers seem to believe long before she starts on the vampire ballerina kung fu.

Late Night with the Devil (2023): The first half or so of Cameron and Colin Cairnes’s (what’s it with all these directing duos these days anyhow?) is a wonderful little horror film, a lovingly created exaggeration of a late 70s TV talk show that turns increasingly bizarre in its supernatural shenanigans. Unfortunately, that’s not enough for the film, and it begins to turn into an oh so 2024 series of “twists” and unnecessary reveals that I began feeling I was watching a scriptwriting rulebook come to life instead of the film the first acts promise.

It’s still a pretty interesting movie, with some effective performances – David Dastalmachian is particularly great at the talk show host – but I found myself increasingly bored by its screenwriting 101 approach to narrative.

Dune: Part Two (2024): I really didn’t expect Denis Villeneuve’s second Dune movie – adapting the second half of the first book - to go quite this consequently and ruthlessly down the road of deconstructing the idea of the chosen one Frank Herbert mostly left for his second novel. Yet here it is, with Villeneuve doubling down on this element of the books early – perhaps because a third film wasn’t guaranteed or simply to set up more physical conflicts for that film – making this the central point of the film.

This doesn’t mean this second film loses any of the visually visionary power of the first one – in fact, here, too, the director seems to be doubling down, making his future even stranger and awe-inspiring than that of the first.

Dirty Ho (1979)

Original title: 爛頭何

“Dirty” Ho Ching (Wong Yu) is a pretty enthusiastic thief with a certain penchant for self-taught kung fu. He’s just managed a great jewel heist and is in the process of spending some of his ill-gotten gains on some high class courtesans (one of whom is played by house favourite Kara Hui Ying-Hung) in a brothel situated on a river boat when a man in a neighbouring pavilion we’ll soon enough learn is named Wang Chin Chen (played by yet another house favourite, Gordon Liu Chia-Hui), is starting to get in a not terribly subtle bidding contest for the ladies’ interests. The size of jewel chests is compared and Ho’s found wanting, until the latter clearly wants to start a more physical kind of fight. The brothel owner calls the police who arrests Ho. However, Wang secretly shows the police a seal that identifies him as part of the Imperial Court, and orders them to let Ho go as soon as possible, while he himself takes care of the thief’s jewels.

Obviously, once released, Ho wants to get back at Wang, but loses a fight against Crimson, whom Wang declares to be his new bodyguard. Well actually, Ho loses against Wang who puppets Crimson while pretending to hide behind her back, but Ho not being terribly bright he’s not going to notice subtleties like this.

Ho does go on to further attempts at getting back at Wang, but the latter needs little effort to have things go his way. Eventually, Ho finds himself poisoned and blackmailed into the role of Wang’s martial arts student.

Unlike Ho, the audience at this point knows what’s going on: Wang is the eleventh son of the Emperor, spending his time on art, fine wine, women and martial arts training while roaming the country, and shows little interest in becoming the next Emperor. However, one of his brothers believes exactly this will undoubtedly make Wang the Emperor’s candidate of choice, and has set in motion various plans to kill this most unwilling of rivals.

Which leads to a couple of incredible scenes during which Wang is invited to sessions with other friends of the arts who try to murder him while both sides pretend to only be interested in wine or paintings. Ho, as usually not getting it, blithely pokes around the edges of these scenes.

Eventually, Wang is hurt badly enough in one of those fights that he needs to intensify Ho’s training as his body guard.

Dirty Ho is a particularly fun example of director and martial arts director Lau Kar-Leung’s ability to make deeply physical kung fu comedies that still don’t have as much of an affinity to slapstick as the Golden Harvest model (which I have grown to love over the years) shows. Instead, his Shaw Brothers comedies have a certain restraint in their physical comedy that can express uproarious humour through the incredible precision of Lau’s brilliant choreography given life through a fine cast of martial artists and actors, but that feels more like Fred Astaire than Buster Keaton (who I both love, as regular readers will know).

There’s a great sense of invention in the film’s fights, even when Lau uses ideas you will also have seen in earlier films of the genre (and that will be repeated ad nauseam in the future). There’s just such a perfection of comical timing and elegance in something like the the puppetting sequence with Liu and Hui, it can leave this viewer quite breathless. Not only from laughter but also in admiration for the intelligence of choreography, visual staging and performance on display. Liu never repeats a trick in the movie, and so every fight scene is of equal brilliance but also absolutely distinctive from the next.

The wine and arts assassin sequences are particularly fine as well, with the mix of physical violence and verbal politeness making for some poignant bits of humour.

This being a Hongkong comedy, there are also moments of outrageous weirdness – some of which might be seen as problematic for some contemporary tastes – as well as a transition to some more serious – and still incredible – fights in the climax, all of which Lau and his cast and crew handle with the same aplomb, elegance and off-handed visual class.

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.

Damsel (2024)

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) is traded in to a far and apparently very prosperous country to marry the local prince in trade for the food and riches that will help her famine-plagued home country survive. Independent and a bit wilful, Elodie isn’t terribly happy about this, her starving subjects only being a thought the script mentions when it remembers them. At least the prince (Nick Robinson) she’s bound to marry seems pleasant enough, while her future stepmother (Robin Wright) is rather on the horrid side, and never acts like you’d act towards a girl you’ll spend a considerable amount of time with in the future.

That’s because this is meant to be a very short marriage, for Elodie is not really meant as a long-term daughter-in-law but as a sacrifice to a dragon. So soon, our heroine finds herself thrown into an abyss by her betrothed and hunted through its murder cave by a sadistic dragon who probably shouldn’t have read all those Thomas Harris novels.

On one hand, I’m all in for a film in which a princess supposed to be sacrificed to a particularly unpleasant kind of political convenience strikes back and wins her independence, and I think parts of the fantasy survivalist middle part of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s movie are rather effective.

On the other hand, I find Damsel’s moral stance when it comes to its dragon main villain either completely unexamined or actively repugnant. Apparently, committing serial killings while gloating sadistically over hunting down young women for centuries, during that course shifting an already shitty culture into an even more shitty form is a-okay and totally excused when said culture – whose living members are generations divorced from the inciting incident – once murdered one’s babies. One wrong apparently makes serial killing innocents perfectly alright, forever. Let’s not even talk about the implied suggestion that, if the victims of the dragon were only really of the bloodline of the royal family of Evilstan, and not just poor nobles married into it to die, murdering them would be any better.

Damsel even plays it as a happy ending when our heroine – after teaming up with the dragon to slaughter the royal family in an act of vengeance that at least hits the actual perpetrators of an evil deed - finishes the dubious tale by taking said serial killing dragoness with her to her homeland, a place that also already suffers from a famine having to feed the fucking monster will probably not help alleviate, even if you’re ignore its murderous and sadistic character.

This makes the ethical stance of most vigilante movies look downright progressive; or at least coherent.

The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)

Original title: La coda dello scorpione

Warning: I’m going to spoil an early twist!

The plane the businessman husband of Lisa Baumer (Evelyn Stewart) is on is destroyed by a bomb while the good lady is having a bit of fun with her lover. Hubby had insured his life for a nice million dollars, and the insurance company seems perfectly willing to pay out at once, without any investigation into the matter. Lisa only has to come to Greece to get the money, for reasons. In truth, the company isn’t really as happy to oblige Lisa as it pretends to be, and has put sexy investigator Peter Lynch (George Hilton) on her trail.

He doesn’t seem to be the only one interested in Lisa, though, for a shadowy figure in classical giallo killer get-up is following her around. For some reason, Lisa wants to take the money due her in cash; and once she has it in her hands, the killer loses little time in dispatching her and absconding with the money.

After Lisa’s death, the female protagonist role shifts to journalist Cléo Dupont (Anita Strindberg), who is rather too nosy for staying healthy in a giallo environment. Of course, there are further murders and curious plot twists coming.

I am quite the admirer of the giallos of director Sergio Martino, and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail is no exception here. This is certainly one of the more conventional of Martino’s giallos, seeing as it follows a properly constructed, if overconstructed (it is a giallo after all), thriller plot that even borrows its early protagonist death from Psycho as if this were a Jimmy Sangster script for one of Hammer’s thrillers of the 60s. This is not a complaint, mind you, for Martino, as was his wont at this stage of his career, puts out all the visual stops: hand camera, POV shots, dramatic close-ups, wonderfully artificial light, unconventional camera angles are all part of his toolkit, as are picture postcard beautiful shots of Greece, and a good bit of bloody business.

Because Martino at this point was one of the masters of this sort of thing, this intense stylishness isn’t just a way to distract the director and his audience from implausible plotting, and the tedium of straightforwardly shot dialogue, or to make his beautiful cast look even more glamorous, but also creates the flow and energy of the film, the tension and release quality so important for thrillers and horror films. As is often the case in the giallo, the director’s style takes on the function of the choreography in a martial arts film or a musical, turning what could be a dry presentation of twists into a sort of dance. Style becomes substance.

Immaculate (2024)

Warning: I will spoil some elements of the film’s ridiculousness, including its ending, because I’m not going to hide its main selling points.

American novitiate nun Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) is transferred to a pretty swanky looking convent for her final vows. The place is actually a hospice for elderly, dying nuns, many of whom suffer from the mental vagaries of old age as well, but clearly, the Church has decided to see them off in style. However, some of the nuns – elderly and not – act rather weirdly, treating Cecilia either as if she were about to be sainted, or like their mortal enemy. Things become curiouser still when Cecilia becomes pregnant – without ever having had sex in her life.

Her superiors decide rather quickly – and certainly without consulting the Vatican – this to be a case of immaculate conception, and thus, Cecilia is the new Mother of God. But there’s something nasty hiding behind dressing our heroine up like Maria and singing her praises.

I have repeatedly gone on record with my general lack of interest in religious horror, but I do tend to make an exception for its absurd and trashy arm, even more so when the absurdity and trashiness is combined either with the values of classic Italian exploitation or an comparatively high budget to pump into its idiocy. Michael Mohan’s Immaculate manages to have a foot in both camps, thus making me very happy indeed.

Having said that, I also have to warn anyone looking for a serious piece of (religious) horror: this is as absurd and trashy as it can get away with, throwing away concepts like believability and logic with great enthusiasm. Andrew Lobel’s script suggests it knows Catholic doctrine only from the pages of 18th Century anti-Catholic literature (as if the actual church didn’t have flaws enough), and has never met a human being or an actual religious believer – fanatic or not. It’s pretty impressive, in its own way, mostly because it enables the film to come up with its central conceit: a Church conspiracy to mad science up an embryo clone of Jesus Christ (gene material apparently donated by a nail from the True Cross) and implant it in a particularly “fertile” young nun, obviously – this is the Church, after all – without consent. Or, if needed, a series of nuns.

As it happens, this conspiracy also is into torture and murder, and has nuns who hide their faces behind stocking masks directly out of giallo central. In practice, this is exactly as awesome (and tasteless) as it sounds. The film’s plot, such as it is, contains little actual drama, but does provide a series of set pieces for Sweeney to enthusiastically overemote in, mechanical jump scares in exhausting number, surprising amounts of squishy gore in the Italian tradition and a general sense of unhinged enthusiasm for material that’s crude and more than just a bit dumb. Of course, its’s exactly that crudity and stupidity that makes the whole affair as enjoyable as it is, even more so since the film mostly plays things straight, as if this were high religious (anti-religious?) drama.

To make things even better, Mohan packages the glorious nonsense in often strikingly composed shots – with more than a nod to Italian exploitation cinema of old –, and stylish, moody camera work while strolling through some wonderfully designed sets.

It’s a truly wonderful piece of exploitation cinema that had me riveted to the screen throughout. I suspect not exactly in the way the film was meant to be taken, but it’s not as if I were doing something as disrespectful as enjoying myself ironically.

Apart from the obvious candidates from the 70s and 80s, this would make fantastic double feature with the likeminded yet also antithetical The Pope’s Exorcist – one can only dream of a team-up between said exorcist and Sister Cecilia, killer of the Sweet Baby Jesus, in a future Pope’s Exorcistiverse movie.

Three Films Make A Post: The World Has Come To An End The World Calls Upon The Hunter

Badland Hunters aka 황야 (2024): Hei Myeong-haeng’s post-apocalyptic action movie is good fun, with Ma Dong-seok (or Don Lee, if you prefer) and Ahn Jiy-hye making pretty great action heroes – the latter really throws herself into her action scenes while looking totally focussed – a hissable villain of the highest degree, and often very effective action choreography. It also has quite a few elements that remind me of the abandon of good, classical post-apocalyptic exploitation cinema, which isn’t as good for it as that may sound. This way, it becomes rather more obvious how much the film pulls its punches, how nice it feels at its core when it could use a bit of nastiness there to go with the theoretically nasty things it features.

Tora-san, His Tender Love aka Otoko wa tsurai yo: Fûten no Tora (1970): There’s a certain, well, a big, actually, be-there done that quality to much of the Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man film series as far as I know them, even this early in the cycle. However, this isn’t really to the detriment of the films when watched responsibly (Tora-san is only to be binged in the most dire of circumstances), but provides the films a comfortable shoe kind of quality. You know the characters, the kind of jokes the film’s going to make, Tora’s faults and foibles, and so on and so forth, but there’s something comforting and kind to the knowledge that fits its main character’s fits of – often badly applied – kindness beyond the fool’s bluster curiously well.

Last Night at Terrace Lanes (2024): Speaking of cinematic comfort food, sometimes you just want to be comforted by the tale of an estranged father and daughter bonding again through the fight against math-based cultists who are attacking the bowling alley they once bonded in, slaughtering all and sundry there.

Because this is 2024, there’s also a bit of Lesbian teen romance in here.

Jamie Nash’s film is never original or deep, but it does the classic low budget movie thing of telling a simple story taking place in a confined space effectively rather well. There’s really nothing at all wrong with that.