The Lady Assassin (1983)

Original title: 清宮啟示錄

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bells of Death (1968)

Original title: 奪魂鈴

Some travelling martial world evil doers murder the family of young woodcutter Chang Wei Fu (Chang Yi) just for the heck of it, and kidnap his sister. The distraught young man soon stumbles upon an experienced swordsman who eventually – after some running and shouting by our hero – teaches Chang Wei Fu martial arts so he can avenge his family.

Some time later, Chang Wei Fu begins hounding his psychopathic – other wuxia villains at least have motives for their misdeeds - enemies with his newly developed skills and the tinkling of an anklet with bells his mother used to wear. He will also acquire something of a love interest – it’s complicated – in one Hsiang Hsiang (Chin Ping) and have a reunion with his sister (Chiu Sam-Yin). None of this will get into the way of vengeance, of course.

The other wuxia directed by Griffin Yueh Feng I’ve seen tend to a certain stodginess and aesthetic conservatism (or perhaps a conscious classicism pointing at earlier style of wuxia, in whose production Yueh was also involved in?). So colour me surprised by The Bells of Death, a grim tale of vengeance that looks and feels like an Italian western, and not just because the tinkling of bells stands in for a harmonica. There’s a lot of dynamic editing, close-ups, and hand-held camera here, not just copied like the newest aesthetic fad but used with deliberation and intelligence, always in service of making the fights feel more brutal, the melodrama more intense, and the mood more doom-laden.

From time to time, Yueh Feng adds some of the more fantastical flourishes of wuxia martial arts – Chang Wei Fu’s mastery is so large, he can even use leaves as weapons - but never lets them get in the way of the grimness of proceedings. There’s impressive tonal coherence to the work, not always a strength of the genre.

The Bells of Death keeps to its grimness throughout – there’s never any doubt this will end with the kind of vengeance that leaves nobody standing at all; what the film thinks about this is difficult to say, for this has none of the love for philosophical discourse of a Chor Yuen/Ni Kuang joint nor even just the more thoughtful moments in Cheng Cheh’s filmography, when even he paused and thought about the prize of slaughter.

If that’s a virtue or a flaw will very much depend on a viewer’s mood.

Three Films Make A Post: Family over everything.

Shadow Force (2025): Joe Carnahan always has been a bit of a hit or miss filmmaker for me, though when he hits, he does tend to find the bullseye.

This piece of action cinema, though, does feel like the product of someone who can’t even be bothered to look in the direction of the target. Everything here, from the bland direct to DVD actioner look (this is not actually a direct to whatever movie), the lifeless script without character or style, the blandly generic action choreography to a script that can’t even be bothered to be interesting enough to be called clichéd, and finally the deeply dull performances by a cast that could do so much better, lacks so completely in personality and life, it’s difficult to even call this a movie. Hell, even “content” might be too friendly a description for something this lacking in soul.

Invader (2024): Certainly not lacking in personality is this brutal serial killer movie by Mickey Keating. This time around, the stylistically very varied director goes all out on jittery, nervous energy, often shaking, handheld camera that perfectly puts into picture the sense of looming threat and paranoia its main character (Vero Maynez) suffers as a foreigner in the USA. Particularly this USA, at this point in time. And though this is mostly a highly efficient, condensed, and often quite nasty, horror movie about a woman threatened by a killer, it works all too well as a mirror of how its time and place feels.

The Executioner (1974): One can’t help but hope the Japan of 1974 did feel like this Teruo Ishii action movie starring beloved Sonny Chiba as the youngest descendent of the Koga ninja clan, gone down in the world to steal a bunch of drugs from the Japanese franchise of the Mafia with a former policeman and a sex pest. For its combination of bizarre violence and the violently bizarre is pretty delightful.

Sure, Ishii has directed weirder things – he’s mostly doing Man’s Adventure with tongue planted firmly in cheek here – and Chiba has been in weirder and/or better movies, but if I’d start judging their movies, or any movies, on that bar, there’d be a very limited amount of joy to be found in my movie watching world.

As far as the world of silly, violent Toei exploitation movies go, this is doing its job of entertaining me more than just fine.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat (1991)

Original title: 女囚さそり 殺人予告

Warning: spoilers for one of the core points of the plot are inevitable!

A young woman (Natsuki Okamoto) is working as a very capable assassin for hire. She’s not exactly a posterchild for feminist self-realization, though, for she is controlled – mentally and sexually – by her handler, who turned a traumatized girl into his own private kill and fuck device.

Her newest mission is rather peculiar: she is to go undercover in a woman’s prison to murder Nami Matsushima, known as Scorpion, a woman whose influence and unbreakable spirit are so large, she has been held in a cave below the prison for years, so she can’t infect the other prisoners with her indomitable spirit. The powers that be of the prison are just that afraid of her.

And no wonder, because as it turns out, for at least half of the prison population has turned Nami into a near mythical figure who will some day get everyone out of the hellhole, and might even threaten the structures of violence and oppression outside.

But there’s something hinky about our assassin’s mission beside the plain weirdness of the situation, a hidden truth, as well as the realization that she, like any other woman, is only a thing to be dropped and destroyed at a man’s convenience.

There have been intermittent attempts to revive the Female Prisoner Scorpion films over the years. I believe this one, directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, who lived at the wondrous place where exploitation and arthouse met, is the most ambitious attempt of them all.

This early in Toei’s V-Cinema cycle, there appears to have been something of an anything goes approach to the types of films that could be made, if they contained a bit of action and nudity, at least. So making a film that’s a sequel to the first two films of an old 70s exploitation series – the rest of the films can’t have happened in this film’s world – that turns the originals darker by virtue of their heroine having been murdered, her dead body walled in must have sounded like a good idea to someone. While I generally don’t like that kind of set-up – let heroic achievements of earlier movies stand – I can’t help but admire what Ikeda does with the idea here.

This is very much a film about how a religion gets started, how a person’s life becomes mythical, how a poetical truth about someone becomes the only truth actually worth anything. Nami the Scorpion, the film argues rather obviously, is the patron goddess women need to survive what men do to them.

Ikeda doubles down on the mytho-religious aspects repeatedly – our protagonist is crucified, and later has a moment of bizarre revelation in which Nami’s dead body gives her the iconic sharpened spoon, literally turning her into an avatar of the Scorpion. All of this Ikeda stages without any irony, but as moments when borders between dream and reality grow thin and the mythical remakes reality in its image. It’s an incredible thing to do in a film that could be a lazy cash-in on a beloved series, but then, the space where the mythical, the real, and the commercial reality of the exploitation movie meet is something of a speciality of Ikeda. His probable masterpiece Mermaid Legend did something very similar some years earlier, perhaps even more successful than he is here.

Death Threat is also simply very satisfying as the kind of exploitation movie where all men, especially men in power, are bastards, but where those men are eventually punished by women who aren’t staying their victims. If that’s not invigorating, I don’t know what is.

Crazy Heart (2009)

Outlaw country musician Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) is going nowhere. An aging alcoholic, he’s stopped writing songs and is mostly working the nostalgia and bowling alley circuit with his old hits, pick-up bands, whiskey and an air of bitterness. Bad’s former, much younger and sexier, sidekick Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) has hit the big time of country music stardom, but his intermittent attempts at helping out feel more like dominance plays and the kind of hand-outs that do not sit well with the rest of dignity Bad still possesses somewhere.

Bad comes to a crossroads when he meets younger journalist and single mom Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and falls for her – or perhaps the idea of falling for her and the different kind of life she stands for.

Sometimes, it’s okay for a director to step back and let their leads, their script and – particularly in this case – their musical experts do most of the work. There’s an admirable ability to shut off one’s director’s ego for a bit needed to do that properly, and Scott Cooper apparently possesses it, and can use it without making a film that looks and feels bland. Rather, this one’s simply focussed on performance and tone, centring Bridges and to a degree Gyllenhaal (whose story this isn’t it, but who always shows she possesses one outside of Bad’s life).

Bridges is in finest form, presenting a character as a relatable human being who might have become either a caricature or just unpleasant in the wrong hands, without attempting to make Bad better than he actually is. He’s also a really great old man outlaw country singer when provided with the right material.

There is a deep sense of compassion running through the film and its treatment of Bad that doesn’t make excuses, either. Yet Crazy Heart carries with it a not uncomplicated hopefulness that feels grown-up and deserved instead of perfunctory and calculated for its market.

It is also a joy to see a film that treats country music with an actual eye from the inside, with many small telling details about this particular intersection of showbiz and working class art that demonstrate how much the filmmakers get it. The involvement of T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton and Ryan Bingham on the musical side will certainly have provided some of the stuff of reality for the film – in any case, these guys do provide Crazy Heart with a tonally and sonically perfect soundtrack.

Three Indonesian Horror Films Make A Post: The thing with the flying coffin happens all the time here

Trinil: Kembalikan Tubuhku (2024): After a three month long honeymoon, a couple returns to the Javanese plantation Rara (Carmela van der Kruk) inherited from her Dad. The place is plagued by a curious series of worker suicides and disappearances, and a flying witch’s head – a kuyang – makes frequent appearances. Rara acts increasingly aggressive, while her hubby mostly cringes and cowers. All of it has something to do with dark secrets of the near past. Fortunately the cowardly male half of the couple has a friend who is a psychiatrist and an exorcist at the same time, so whatever could go wrong?

The very broad, sometimes hilariously so, acting, the just as broad direction, and the melodramatically twisting plot can give the impression that Hanung Bramantyo’s Trinil is some kind of crazily mutated plantation soap opera. If one can imagine a soap opera with kuyang (the beloved witch with a flying head figure), quite a few lobbed off heads, virtual bodies buried basically everywhere and a properly insane climax too fun to describe. None of this is exactly good, or exactly well made, but it has a crazed energy and a complete disregard for good taste that makes it a lot of fun to watch.

Kuyang: Sekutu Iblis yang Selalu Mengintai (2024): Speaking of kuyang, this Borneo-set tale of the misadventures of a young teacher and his pregnant wife taking on a position in a completely normal (see title of this post) isolated village and stumbling into a choice bit of folk/black magic horror features not one, but two of the creatures, who will even duel for a (alas only very short) bit.

This is shot with a bit more style and moodiness, the acting is a little better, and the plot makes more sense than that of Trinil, though the too long series of scenes where something utterly outrageous happens but everyone just kind of shrugs it off can strain one’s patience a bit. On the other hand, this film, too, climaxes wonderfully, with some beautifully macabre images and a lot of kuyang action.

Do You See What I See (2024): Of these three, Awi Suryadi’s movie is the classiest and most subtextually resonant, as well as the film whose director has the most control over his material. But then, Suryadi is one of the core directors of the decade’s Indonesian horror cycle, and knows how to set up lingering mood pieces, as well as short, sharp jump scares and is one of the directors who created the filmic language with its mix of very Western contemporary mainstream horror influences and old-school Indonesian horror the country’s horror directors speak in at the moment.

Apart from the obligatory – and often increasingly wonderful – horrors, this is a film about female friendship and empowerment, where the only actual male character is a pretty, vapid, and untrustworthy idiot, and love for a man is mostly treated as a threat to sanity and a young woman’s mental well-being – particularly when the lover turns out to be dead.

Apart from Suryadi’s obvious strengths, I particularly admired his willingness for keeping things off-screen here. We never get to see the ghost lover as poor Mawar sees him – in fact, for much of the film we see him only reflected in the changes he inflicts on her. There’s also quite a particular kind of daring to making a girl power film that still goes for a 70s downer ending.

The Silent Star (1960)

Original title: Der schweigende Stern

(There’s also a cut-down, re-cut, English dubbed version of the film called First Spaceship on Venus – I’m not talking about that one here)

The Near Future. Scientists discover a curious alien artefact in the area of the Tunguska meteor impact. Its origin is apparently Venus, and it contains what appears to be a message in a language linguists – first among them a Chinese (Hua-Ta Tang) and an Indian (Kurt Rackelmann, in brownface) expert – are trying and failing hard to decipher.

Still, the scientific community, gifted with the Soviet spaceship initially meant for a Mars expedition, decides to send a mission to Venus to find our intelligent neighbours. Apart from the gentlemen already mentioned, the crew is international in a way to give the current US president a heart attack while screeching about “DEI” or “wokeness”. Even an American scientist (Oldrich Lukes) takes part, though to the unhappiness of his bosses at “the Consortium”.

There’s some drama on the ship – cue a painful doomed romance between the traumatized astro-medico (Yoko Tani) and the German, hot shot pilot with the receding hairline (Günther Simon) – but eventually, once they arrive on Venus, the crew make exciting discoveries in what turn out to be the ruins of a civilization that took a wrong turn.

Science Fiction, called “Utopian” literature there (as often here in Western Germany as well), was a popular literary genre in the DDR (or German Democratic Republic, Eastern Germany). Whenever the political stars of censorship and propaganda aligned correctly, there were attempts to also make SF cinema happen.

This first SF film produced by the DEFA (the state’s very own film company) – in cooperation with Poland and an abortive attempt at working with French Pathé – was directed by Kurt Maetzig, a higher-up in the DEFA structure who apparently had the clout to get it made, if going through three different batches of writers on the way, in turns making it less, then more, then less propagandistic. This is based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, but I don’t know how it compares.

Technically and visually, this is quite the achievement, presenting a future visually not only inspired by western SF cinema on film but also by choice pulp SF cover art. There’s an orderliness and cleanliness to the designs that rubs this Alien-made viewer emotionally the wrong way a little, but objectively, the mix of grandiosity and sobriety is utterly beautiful.

Once we arrive on Venus, the film appears to prefigure Bava’s Planet of Vampires, presenting a planet full of objects the characters themselves often can’t categorize as artificial or natural. There’s an alienness to this part of the film that’s very Lem (in a specific mode), and still works to be somewhat disquieting.

On the level of narrative and characters, Silent Star is considerably weaker – its first half is a bit of a slog, full of the international cast speaking slowly in the emotionless German dub, and a de-emphasis on the more dramatic elements of what is happening on screen that sometimes feels nearly perverse.

Thematically, the Hiroshima and heroism-doomed romance fits the darker elements of the film  well, but its execution has an antiseptic quality that never suggests this may be about actual human emotion instead of fitting thematic material.

Speaking of themes, this is absolutely a film standing in the shadow of the H-bomb, seeing this use of nuclear power as a kind of (perfectly atheist) original sin, or rather the great crossroads of humanity: do we use this power responsibly and go off into a bright future, or do we vote for egotism and self-destruction like the Venusians? Not the sort of thing you’d get treated this earnestly in many American SF films of the era.

It is of course fascinating to see a film that works from very different ideological assumptions than much SF material on screen. The emphasis on international cooperation and serious and respectful co-existence between all kinds of people appears rather earlier than in western screen SF. It is presented a little demonstrative, of course (this is after all also a propaganda piece). Still, from the perspective of 2025, this kind of future feels like an impossible dream, and I found myself feeling melancholia and nostalgia for a future that never came to be. Hell, the Eastern parts of united Germany are one of the hot beds of racism and right-wing thought in my country these days, so there’s also some sad irony to be had.

Death Whisperer (2023) & Death Whisperer 2 (2024)

Warning: some spoilers included!

Death Whisperer takes place in Thailand in 1972. We’re mostly concerned with a farmer family whose many children all have names starting with Y – there’s Yard, Yam, Yos, Yod, Yee, Yen and Yak - which makes it somewhat difficult to keep them straight in dialogue until about the final act of the first movie. As if having a Dad who is badly trying to be a traditional patriarch and terrible at giving his kids names weren’t difficult enough, the family are beset by attacks of a supernatural entity that seems focussed on the youngest, Yee (Nutthatcha Padovan). For some time, it is not at all clear if the spirit wants to eat or possess her; what is clear is that it likes to put families through the emotional wringer, delighting in wreaking emotional as well as physical pain. The local shaman, Sarge (Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul), is of some help, as is the return of Yak (Nadech Kugimiya), the son who didn’t want to become a farmer so much, he became a soldier instead, yet the spirit’s attacks become ever more disturbing.

And this willingness to get increasingly weird is one the two main strength of Taweewat Wantha’s Death Whisperer. It also stands in marked contrast to the aesthetically conservative streak of the film: this is very much a film that takes elements of the contemporary Southeast Asian horror mainstream (particularly Indonesian horror), some bits and bobs of the Conjuringverse and films like the South Korean The Wailing, and transplants them into the Thailand of the early 70s without doing much with the historical context. This mostly works out okay for the film because it is good at picking and choosing the pieces that work for it, and because Wantha manages to use them in a way that doesn’t let them feel like magpied bits of other films, but rather parts of the one at hand.

The film’s other main strength is its great hand when it comes to the kind of set piece that suddenly ramps up the tension or the ick-factor. These are nearly always well-placed and effectively realized – just look at the first teeth-stealing (it’s a whole thing in these movies) scene.

Death Whisperer 2 takes place three years after the tragic ending of the first one. Everyone in the family has tried to move on – Yad (Jelicha Kapaun) is even engaged to be married and move away – except for Yak, whose disgust for horror movie bullshit endings has caused him to team up with Sarge and become a rural exorcist and ghost puncher (no, really, he’s punching ghosts on the regular). The latter term, I’ve borrowed from a Letterboxd review from the great Gemma Files, because it’s the only, and perfect, term to describe Yak’s new occupation. Yak is specifically hunting the ghost who killed his sister, but leaves nothing else supernatural unexorcised and/or unpunched on the way.

Eventually, Yak punches his way to a haunted forest, where he, Sarge, and some macho assholes are getting a ghost history lesson while encountering a lot of disturbing, not always punchable, things that go bump.

At the same time, the remaining family members are threatened by the spirit as well, until things climax on the evening of Yad’s engagement do.

Where the first film does go for a somewhat generic, atmospheric ghost horror with incursions of weird vibes, the second one externalises most internal horror into a wild tale of Yak-centric ghost action and one of the best funhouse-style horror climaxes I’ve seen in quite some time. There’s macho posturing, one-liners like “You fucked with the wrong family, you godamn ghost!”, and a general sense of filmmakers who have been given a blank check after a very successful first film to do whatever the hell they want – which is apparently a tale of ghost punching and shotguns with magic bullets.

All of which could be dumb, and a bit of a disappointing tone shift, but actually feels like a perfect way to escalate things. Wantha’s still great at the more traditional spooky bits, but he also excels at the more action-heavy parts of the movie by absolutely, unironically, embracing the cheesiness and the silliness while keeping the creepy parts creepy. It’s the sort of thing young Sam Raimi would have been proud of, and one could imagine Don Coscarelli nod at approvingly, and makes Death Whisperer 2 the superior kind of sequel I always hope for in any horror movie sequel.

Three Films Make A Post: Every night a different nightmare.

Until Dawn (2025): There’s very little substance to David F. Sandberg’s horror videogame adaptation (which apparently isn’t any kind of close adaptation, people who actually played it tell me), but as an amusement park horror piece that sets off from a somewhat clever high concept to provide a series of ever-changing set pieces of suspense and gore, this is actually great stuff.

I’m not always the biggest fan of “fun horror” (it’s me, not the fun), but for me, this supernatural slasher variant simply hits all the right notes, is well paced and staged, and features a bunch of characters that isn’t too annoying to spend a hundred minutes with. Plus, once you’ve hit the spot where a series of messily exploding characters is just one of a dozen of good little gore gags you provide, you’re doing alright in my book.

Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025): This Netflix thing directed by Matt Palmer, on the other hand, is as bad as slickly produced horror gets. It must have been difficult to follow up on Leigh Janiuk’s brilliant Fear Street trilogy with its mix of all horror genres, ever, and its treatment of race and class, and the feeling of doom teens of the underclasses carry around with them, but surely, the way to go there shouldn’t have been to not even try to reach the level of the previous movies.

As it stands, this is the epitome of laziness: boring 80s nostalgia, and over-reliance on plot twists, acting that suggests a complete absence of directorial guidance, perfunctory gore, and writing so disinserted and flat, the whole thing doesn’t actually feel as if anybody involved cared even so much to create a good product, let’s not even speak of a decent movie.

Demon City aka Oni Goroshi (2025): Speaking of films that don’t even feel like good product, this (again) Netflix outing by director Seiji Tanaka somehow manages to make a movie about a super assassin waking up from a coma to murder the corrupt real estate development cultists that killed his family (on the day of his retirement, of course) I can’t get behind.

Well, I say “somehow”, but really, simply by an inability to stage and choreograph a decent action scene, an unwillingness to really make its weird villains feel weird (or silly) instead of just faintly stupid, and a tendency to drown the soundtrack in the shittiest “rock” guitar thrashing I’ve had the displeasure to hear in a long time.

The Black Tavern (1972)

Original title: 黑店

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danger Point: The Road to Hell (1991)

Original title: Danger Point: Jigokuhenomichi

A couple – and that description can very effectively be read literally, depending on how you read the film’s final scene – of hitmen (Jo Shishido and Sho Aikawa) get curious when their latest victim offers them more money than they could ever get their hands on through their usual work, while grabbing the photo of a hospital nurse (Nana Okada). Too curious for their handler, who drops them after a single, polite question about what the dead man might have been talking about.

This new state of being out of a job to pay for suits and sunglasses does of course make the thought of a lot of money even more enticing, and so the killers turn detectives, though the sort of detectives that let Mike Hammer look like a nice guy. Soon, they are on the trail a group of gangsters and a corrupt cop, and indeed a whole lot of ill-gotten money.

If the new Arrow Blu-ray box with early Toei V-Cinema films teaches me anything, it is certainly that these early examples of the form were a meeting place of veteran talent making their way from TV or other low budget work, and the young guns that I’ve only known at the forefront of the conversation in western circles about it.

Here, it’s Jo Shishido – all sagging chipmunk cheeks and mild yet cold expression – starring alongside a young Sho Aikawa demonstrating a mixture of casual brutality and eager to please puppy dog charm very fitting to the relationship between these two, and Hideo Murota doing one of his patented villain – though our protagonists are obviously also villains – turns.

The film is directed by exploitation – and at this point TV – veteran Yasuharu Hasebe – not an unknown quantity to Shishido. Hasebe’s direction doesn’t have the energy of his early films, or the sheer nastiness and excitement of his 70s roman porn work, but there’s a moody, bright day neo noirish quality to his filmmaking that makes the simple, slow-moving plot genuinely engaging even in the many moments when there isn’t actually much going on on screen. Hasebe still uses some of his old stylistic flourishes whenever there’s action or violence to emphasise, but there’s a degree of calmness to his work here I don’t remember from his younger and wilder days. He’s rather more Shishido than Aikawa.

This provides the film with limited appeal as an action film, so Danger Point mostly lives off the interplay between its leads and its mood of doomed, brutal struggle, which does turn it into an unexpected joy.

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.

Pursuit of Vengeance (1977)

Original title: 明月刀雪夜殲仇

Melancholy wandering swordsman Fu Hong-Xue (Ti Lung) meets wisecracking wandering swordsman Ye Kai (Lau Wing). The latter does his best to hit it off with the former with limited success.

Various other martial artists/assassins seem to be rather interested in killing one or the other, for reasons that’ll become clear eventually. For now, the odd couple are invited to the party of the local martial arts clan, the Mas. It’s a bit of a peculiar shindig, for the evening before, six empty coffins were delivered to the Ma Mansion – not before Fu Hong-Xue and Ye Kai had fought off a team of assassins who also arrived in coffins, but that’s par for the course in the martial world of a Chor Yuen film.

Can it be an accident that Ma clan leader Ma Kong-Qun (Paul Chang Chung) has invited six martial artists?

As it turns out, twenty years ago, Ma was involved in the killing of the hero Bai, and everybody believes that twenty years after the fact – which is to say now – Bai’s son is going to take vengeance on the group of martial artists who killed his father. Ma suspects this son is one of his six guests.

Things become rather more complicated from here on out and will also include a delightful anti-hero turn by Lo Lieh – dressed in what we have to assume is a bathrobe throughout travels, travails and fights –, an evil mastermind who produces life-like masks for others to add to the confusion, hordes of martial artists totally committed to their respective fighting gimmicks, and the most astonishing finishing freeze frame of any Shaw Brothers film, particularly if you’re a fan of Lo Lieh’s ass.

I’ve been loving the films of that great master of Shaw Brothers wuxia Chor Yuen for actual decades. And yet, the first proper – or what goes for “proper” around here these days – write-up I make of one of his films is for this, definitely one of the director’s minor wuxia, sharing a protagonist (and lead actor Ti Lung, of course) with the masterful Magic Blade, though very little of that film’s tone.

Well, it does share that part of its predecessor that’s wildly weird, often bordering on the goofy, the love for sarcastic dialogue wuxia on screen usually lacks, and of course Chor Yuen’s eye for the beauty of the artificial, the proper contrast between set and location work, and the artful framing of the beautifully improbable action. So let’s say it doesn’t share in its predecessor’s sense of melancholia and futility.

Pursuit features by far not the best action choreography Tong Kai did for a Chor Yuen wuxia, but there’s still enough magic for anyone who is even mildly into this sort of thing.

Just don’t expect the general weirdness of everything and everyone except our wonderful protagonist/straight man Ti Lung to be balanced with a sense of melancholia or even horror at the things these people do to one another. This case of mystery and vengeance, while having the body count to be expected of this sort of thing, is decidedly on the emotionally light side – often getting down to a downright comedy version of the martial world. Which does take particular getting used to in a film that follows the tonally very different Magic Blade but does give one a breather after all those Chor Yuen wuxia that end in doom and gloom.

It does help that the film’s jokes are generally pretty damn funny, the dialogue is joyfully absurd and dry. Lo Lieh and Lau Wing in particular seem to delight in this. But then, the curiously moral assassin Lu Xiao Jia introduces himself first by somehow dropping a gigantic bathtub into a street, getting naked, and mocking Fu and Ye from that bathtub, which is not something any actor will get to do very often during their career.