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.

Three Films Make A Post: Some movies stay with you forever…and ever…and ever.

Room 237 (2012): Because I didn’t get along with Rodney Ascher’s sleep paralysis doc The Nightmare, I never did get around to this much-praised earlier documentary about a handful of rather intense, sometimes obsessive interpretations of Kubrick’s The Shining. The thing is, Ascher’s neutral and somewhat sensationalizing approach works rather better when used on art than on a medical phenomenon, because there’s no objective truth that could be buried under reams of bullshit, only people and their ideas and emotions when confronted with art that clearly touches something in them deeply. I also prefer the director’s use of archival footage from many a movie to visualise what his interviewees see in The Shining to the bad horror movie re-stagings of the later film.

Of course, now living in a world where QAnon is a thing that has sucked all joy out of conspiracy theories as folklore and turned them into weapons, I do wish the film wouldn’t have included the ravings of that moon landing conspiracy guy, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen to the best of films.

Haunted School: The Curse of the Word Spirit (2014) aka Gakkou no kaidan: Noroi no kotodama: There’s quite a bit of fun to be had with Masayuki Ochiai’s tale of a haunted school experienced through the eyes of three different groups of people whose temporal and spatial connection will only become clear late in the film. The plot is not without interest, and quite a few of the spooky sequences film around the lack of a decent effects budget rather well – this is the sort of film that can do something surprisingly effective with the set-up of a corridor, a mirror, and a soft drink can.

On the negative side, there are a couple more larger speaking roles in the ensemble cast than decently capable actors available – noticeable even if you don’t speak Japanese. Ochiai also has a bit of a tendency to stay way too long in certain scenes late in the movie, apparently assuming that every explanation needs to be iterated at least three times to get into a viewer’s thick skull.

Encounter of the Spooky Kind aka 鬼打鬼 aka Close Encounter of the Spooky Kind aka Spooky Encounters (1980): Inexplicably, I had never seen Sammo Hung’s utterly wonderful pioneering martial arts/ghost movie before this week. It’s my own loss, obviously, for its mixture of incredible kung fu choreography, slapstick, and general weirdness is just as irresistible as one would hope for. Sammo’s in great form in all of his jobs here – actor, director, and choreographer –, jokes are funny (that’s not a given, particularly with the language barrier between the film and this viewer), the martial arts inventive and often funny and brutal at once, and the script about the travails of our protagonist fighting off hopping vampires, black magic and an evil rich guy is zippy, clever, and has a pretty great shock ending as well, leaving this as a perfect example of its genres.

In short: Shanghai Express (1986)

Original title: 富貴列車

aka (The) Millionaire(‘)s(‘) Express

A whole bunch of people congregates in and around the Shanghai Express. Everyone wants to stop the train for some reason, be they mountain bandits including Cynthia Rothrock and Richard Norton trying to rob a group of Japanese spies, a village security chief turned also robber (Eric Tsang Chi-Wai) trying to jump the train to flee from the village he betrayed, or Sammo Hung playing a man who wants to drum up business for the bordello he freshly opened in his old home village to make up for a flooding incident (don’t ask). Because that’s not enough crazy characters and their shenanigans, there are also various plots and subplots involving the village’s new security chief Yuen Biao, a man on the train badly attempting to cheat on his wife, little Fong Sai Yuk and his dad, and probably half a dozen other weirdoes doing something I’ve just forgotten now.

Obviously, Sammo Hung’s Shanghai Express is a decidedly messy film, full of characters – inevitably played by some beloved Hong Kong actor or another - that are only there to fill one joke scene or two, comedy that excitedly jumps all over the place in tone and style, with quite a few scenes whose approach to slapstick is as close to Harold Lloyd as anything you’ll encounter in Hong Kong cinema, which is to say, close as Siamese twins, other scenes that look and feel like spaghetti western comedy, and so on and so forth. This scattershot approach could become annoying rather quickly, but the way Hung does it here, the actual feeling I got from the film was of an excited – and excitable – generosity, the director just running through everything that’s lovely in comedy to him, trying to include everyone he knows in Hong Kong cinema (so basically everyone), giving everyone, including himself, a scene or two to shine while being as silly as possible. For some reason, it’s also a supposed train movie that mostly takes place in a village.


Because this is a Sammo Hung joint, the inevitable martial arts sequences – the final third or so is basically nothing but fighting as it should be – are of the highest calibre, sometimes gimmicky, sometimes straight, frequently hilarious and always effortlessly brilliant. My personal favourite is Sammo’s punch-up with Cynthia Rothrock, but there’s so much to just look at and gawk at here, everyone watching who has a soul will have her own favourite bits and pieces.

Three Films Make A Post: For 500 years the secret lay dormant... Until now!

Ghost Town (1988): There’s a lot about Richard Governor’s only film (as finished by its DP Mac Ahlberg) Ghost Town that should make it an easy recommendation: the charm of its ghost town, how courageously it aims for the dream-like and the ambiguous, and more than one clever idea. But all that gets buried by a film that never actually finishes anything it starts, a plot that meanders all over the place without rhyme or reason, a big bad who never can shut up spouting his horrible, pseudo-creepy monologues and the damn one-liners, and a lot of the wrong kind of tedium.

Spooky, Spooky (1988): Tedium isn’t something happening in this Sammo Hung-directed horror comedy from Hong Kong, on the other hand. If you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect: characters with the emotional life of children, slapstick, martial arts, some mildly icky stuff, Chinese folklore, utter weirdness, a whole load of blue light, and a film philosophically and ethically set against being boring. This one actually starts a bit slow, but once it gets going, Spooky Spooky doesn’t stop anymore until it’s time for the credits to roll. On the way, Hung also somehow manages to include slapstick and martial arts based suspense scenes that are as tight as the ones in more earnest-minded films would be and teaches us the best use for a watermelon.

Creepozoids (1987): But let’s not end this post on too much of a high note. So who better to come to my help there than David DeCoteau, carrying an early epic about some non-entities played by non-entities and Linnea Quigley’s breasts wandering through a warehouse for fifty minutes or so. There’s some business about a virus that makes you allergic to food in the worst possible way, an adorable giant rat, and more tedium than you can expect from three movies of this sort. Why, even the big finale is a long slog. A long slog, that is, until the film’s horrid monster suit births a monster baby. Then, it’s ten minutes of hilarity during which one guy (seriously, using actor and character names would suggest an individuality that’s just not on screen) pretends to get attacked by the monster baby thing by shaking the doll around, repeated as often as necessary to get this thing on sort of feature length.