The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968)

Original title: 一代劍王

Swordsman Tsai Yieng-Chieh (Tien Peng) is obsessed with vengeance. He is hunting down the men who killed his family to acquire a valuable sword when he was still a child.

But his straightforward way to slaughtering a quartet of vile men is getting increasingly complicated and morally grey. Even though he is trying to keep´cool and removed from the world, connection is not to be escaped: he gets help, if he want to or not, by people with agendas of their own. There’s Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) who saves him from a deadly poison for reasons having something to do with not repeating the injustices of previous generations (and probably love, as well), and who will indeed turn out to be the daughter of one of the men Tsai is planning to take vengeance on. Then there’s Black Dragon (Chiang Nan), the greatest swordsman in the martial world (he’s got a little medal that says so), who helps out our protagonist because he just needs to have a duel with him when the whole vengeance business is over and done with.

Eventually, even one of those horrible killers Tsai has set out to kill right back will turn out to have repented, and be quite helpless now.

I really have underrated director Joseph Kuo. Some of his films may have been shoddy attempts to jump on the newest trends, but at least this early in his career, he was also able to make a proper masterpiece like this wuxia. At first, it appears to be a well-shot but straightforward vengeance tale, with a straightforward hero hunting down straightforward villains for straightforward reasons in a straightforward manner. But with every additional character Kuo introduces, things become less easy and less clear, vengeance turns out to not be just in every case, and the obsession of the martial world with very clear and strict rules of conduct not fit for the more complicated world of the human heart. These rules turn out not be an ethical way to lead one’s life, but a cage one traps oneself and others in.

Visually, Kuo couches this tale in often beautiful and poetic nature shots that position the human drama in a world that mirrors and comments on it, and at times dynamic, at times focussed swordfights. It’s all wonderfully of a piece, where what at first appear to be distractions will turn out to be important parts of the film’s philosophical argument – it’s rather astonishing coming from a typically distractible director like Kuo.

Three Films Make A Post: Insert Clever Title Here

Mojin: The Lost Legend aka 鬼吹燈之尋龍訣 (2015): A trio of traditional-official tomb raiders return from dubious retirement in America to China to rob a particularly mysterious tomb. This high on very digital looking effects adventure directed by Wuershan (and based on one part of a long and complicated sounding series of novels) is a whole lot of fun if you like this kind of blockbuster at all.

It’s like a Chinese Indiana Jones with more supernatural action, some surprisingly snarky remarks towards the Cultural Revolution (though it isn’t called by name), and quite a bit of the sense of anything goes that made Hong Kong cinema so enticing but not generally translated to mainland China cinema like this. This really has everything and the kitchen sink in it: romance, zombies, Shu Qi, Shu Qi cursing a lot, complicated mechanical traps, a weird cult, bizarre humour, Shu Qi, and more good and bad ideas than most film trilogies.

Mojin: The Worm Valley aka 雲南蟲谷 (2018): And three years later this happened: none of the actors nor the director of the original return, and with them also leaves the spirit of fun of the first film, as well as parts of the budget. There’s something rote and mechanical about the whole affair – this is pretty much the empty and lifeless spectacle too many people pretend all blockbuster style cinema is, lacking in fun, joy, and the ability to actually deliver the promised rollercoaster ride as a rollercoaster ride.

Deadful Melody aka 六指琴魔 (1994): Welcome to 90s wuxia land. Various martial world weirdoes attempt to steal a magical lute that also happens to be the most powerful weapon this side of your favourite magical sword, while a mysterious, sometimes cross-dressing woman played of course by Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia takes bloody vengeance for the death of her family. Also featured are a not terribly young Yuen Biao as the young hero and Carina Lau Ka-Ling as his love interest and comic relief.

The rest of the film mostly consists of a breathless series of shots of people flying, making shit explode with their Qi, a lot of twirling and a good amount of flying body parts, blue fog, blue light, blue everything, all presented by director Ng Min-Kan with the manic energy of Joel Silver on a real coke binge. This is absolutely awe-inspiring if you enjoy this wuxia revival as much as I do, and aren’t afraid of headaches.

Another Three Shaw Brothers Movies Make A Post

The Deadly Knives aka Fists of Vengeance aka 落葉飛刀 (1972): This is a very standard tale of dastardly Japanese and traitorous Chinese getting vengeanced by a virtuous stand-up Chinese guy. Director Jang Il-Ho doesn’t add much to the Shaw house style, and often stands in the way of getting to the good parts of the material or even in the way of framing those good parts as effectively as he could.

Not that the choreography is that great: like a lot of work that Yuen Woo-Ping did for the Shaw Brothers, this may not be standard Shaw choreography, but it’s not that great at actually being different – quite the contrast to what he would get up to only a few years later. On the plus side, this features Ching Li (though a lot of actually good Shaw movies do as well, so…).

Duel for Gold aka 火併 (1971): This is Chor Yuen’s first film made for the studio, and this wuxia version already shows some of the hallmarks of my favourite director of the studio’s wuxia output – the less heroic view of the martial world that still leaves space for acts of traditional heroism, the love for multi-way climactic fights with shifting allegiances, the strong hand for characterization even in movies that take place in a pretty damn weird world, the re-emphasis on women as important players in the martial world, and the ability to get the best from his cast – here featuring Ivy Ling Po, Wang Ping, Lo Lieh and others.

Visually, this wuxia version of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre with greater gender parity doesn’t quite feel like a Chor Yuen wuxia yet but keeps closer to the Shaw standard of 1971. Fortunately, that standard’s so high, the film’s still great.

Shadow Girl aka 隱身女俠 (1971): Come for the ultra-traditional tale of clashing martial arts families and stay for the practical effects shenanigans of an invisible Lily Li Li-Li - invisible by day, visible by night thanks to experiments conducted by her crazy grandma, no less.

Taiwanese director Hsin Chi’s film is generally good fun – the practical effects alone should warm the coldest of hearts – but a little uneven with a somewhat slow middle and a few more characters hanging around than is good for it. On the other hand, this also features a floating evil legless hermit and his just as evil brother, whose martial arts powers are based on the magic of jump cuts, so there’s no way for me not to have fun with it.

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.

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.

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.

Three Films Make A Post: A Scream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

Screamboat (2025): In the realm of the PublicDomainsploitation slasher, something like Steven LaMorte’s murderous Mickey Mouse effort is basically a masterpiece. That’s not saying terribly much given a sub-genre that usually makes 90 SOV slashers look brilliant in comparison. So outside of its particular little pond, it’s a basically competent by the numbers slasher with pop culture jokes. Which is to say, it’s a little dull.

Unlike with many a film of its kind, those pop culture jokes are actually standing in dialogue with the thing it has been inspired by – the next step would be to make this dialogue actually interesting, or more of the jokes funny. But I’m optimistic that some day, one of these movies will actually do more than drop jokes and have children’s characters do the slasher thing. This one’s half way there, after all.

Rape of the Sword (1967): Even in 1967, Griffin Yueh Feng’s vengeance-based wuxia must have felt a bit old-fashioned. The film featuring two female heroines in form of Li Ching and Li Lihua as its lead right at the end of this cycle of the domination of female-led wuxia (despite what some writers say, swordswomen leading never went completely away before the next big revival) is the kind of old-fashioned I like, obviously. Yueh’s filmmaking as well as the choreography are a bit dusty as well, though never in a way that lacks in charm when seen from half a century away, while the narrative is very standard and trope-heavy. Again, not unpleasantly so, if one enjoys the genre – I certainly do again, these days.

Burning Dog (1991): This early V-cinema movie directed by Yoichi Sai doesn’t go as heavy on the sleaze and the insanity as one might expect when one has mostly seen more extreme examples of the form. Instead, this is basically a 70s heist movie, starring Seiji Matano trying to look like a badly aged Yusaku Matsuda, and other middle-aged guys of some experience.

The pacing is slow and careful, the action, once it comes, feels rather too methodically staged, but there’s also an unhurried calmness to Sai’s approach to the crime movie which makes it worth watching. Again, as with Rape of the Sword, there’s a lot of joy to be found in somewhat middling genre entries for me.

Three Films Make A Post: So, what does Jirocho do, exactly?

The Kingdom of Jirocho 4 (1965): In this final of four Jirocho movies starring the great Koji Tsuruta and directed by Masahiro Makino, things change: about half of the characters are recast – generally not for the better – and something like focus appears, one might even say this one’s got a plot. Tonally, there’s still quite a bit of the funny business, but much of the film is taken over by Jirocho’s wife slowly and very dramatically dying of what I can only assume is consumption.

The production as a whole feels cheaper, and rather like a project everyone involved was trying to get over with as quickly as possible. However, there are still enough aesthetically or emotionally pleasing moments here to make this a somewhat satisfying viewing, at least if you’re into ninkyo eiga.

Magnificent Trio (1966): This isn’t exactly one of the more spectacular offerings from Chang Cheh’s early wuxia phase. Its actual emotional and moral core lies surprisingly enough with the female characters – particularly those played by Margaret Tu Chuan and Chin Ping – but this being a Chang Cheh joint, he puts emphasis on the much less interesting business of his male trio, of whom only Lo Lieh’s doubtful hero is actually interesting. There are bits and pieces in the background of Jimmy Wang Yu’s and Cheng Lei’s characters that could be thematically interesting but the film never really gets into those.

What’s left is a decent mid-60s Shaw Brothers wuxia – that’s still nothing to sneeze at.

Para Betina Pengikut Iblis: Part 2 aka The Female Followers of the Devil: Part 2 (2024): Rako Prijanto doubles down on the insanity of the first part of the story, and tries to squeeze even more melodramatic acting, trashy yet awesome gore, and general disreputable mayhem in, while also adding a bit of religion, fights between the now three Female Followers, a bit of a demonic zombie apocalypse and martial arts of doubtful quality.

If that doesn’t sound like a good time to you, dear imaginary reader, I don’t know what to say.

One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

Original title: 獨臂刀

Because his father sacrifices himself to protect his master Qi Ru-Feng (Tien Feng), the master swordsman takes on Fang Kang (soon grown into Jimmy Wang Yu) as his pupil and takes care of him pretty much like a son. This doesn’t manage reduce the huge amounts of anger and guilt inside of Fang Kang much, and though he grows up to become Qi Ru-Feng’s best pupil – in the ways of the sword as well as those of honour and simple human decency – the young man simply feels inadequate.

It certainly doesn’t help his emotional well-being that Qi Ru-Feng’s other students use him as a verbal – and physical - punching bag based on him coming from the lower classes. Even Ru-Feng’s daughter Qi Pei-Er (Violet Pan Ying-Zi) is part of the bullying – in her case this is an attempt to deny her own attraction to him filtered through some rather spectacular self-centeredness.

Fang Kang decides to leave his master, but on a final encounter with Pei-Er and the upper-class twats, a mixture of bad luck on his side and horrible impulse control on hers lead to her cutting off one of his arms while she’s pretending to surrender in a fight he didn’t want.

The mutilated Fang Kang more or less stumbles into the arms of peasant girl Xiao Man (Lisa Chiao Chiao), where for some time he finds peace, physical and emotional healing, as well as love. As the wuxia gods will have it, Xiao Man is actually the daughter of a martial artist who got killed for the usual martial world reasons, and the owner of half of a martial arts manual meant to train the left arm. That’s the only arm Fang Kang has left, and he simply can’t stop himself from learning to fight with only one arm at the same time he’s professing to be finished with the martial world.

That’s going to come in useful when Fang Kang is drawn back into into it. His old master and all of his other students are under attack by a group of villains who have developed a rather cruel fighting technique that counters their golden sword arts, and these guys are not going to rest until all of Qi Ru-Feng’s people are dead. Being a honourable and responsible man who can’t stand by when he witnesses wholesale slaughter of a family he still feels bound to, Fang Kang will put himself into danger again.

As much as I love the later periods of Chang Cheh’s body of work, the films he made when he still had to play by some of the rules of wuxia are special to me. In them, like in this classic, some of Chang’s weaknesses simply didn’t apply. So we have actual female characters with personalities, motivations and even some depth, and a narrative that feels tight, focussed, and more than just a mood meant to stitch fantastic martial arts sequences together.

In fact, while the fights here are pretty damn spectacular and influential on anything that came after in the genre for good reason, One-Armed Swordsman is very serious about telling a complex tale of a man growing up, working through trauma and hurt to become someone who is not only loved but feels himself worthy of being loved, learning to give back what he receives emotionally, and working through his issues to become a whole person instead of one defined only through his losses. In a turn of events one really doesn’t expect of Chang, here, Fang Kang’s sadness when he looks at the bodies of people he has slain feels absolutely genuine – and part of the point of the film. This isn’t about vengeance and everybody bleeding to death in the film’s final shot, but actually about how to live – with pain, and hurt, injustice, and love.

Jimmy Wang Yu – who’d become a bit of a one note dispenser of anger after leaving the Shaw Brothers – here acts with surprising depth of feeling, admitting weaknesses and complexities into his performance I can’t remember finding in much of anything he’d go on to do during the 70s. There’s a fearlessness in admitting to the pain Fang Kang goes through that I find rather more impressive than reels of slaughtering fake Japanese.

There’s a reason this one is an absolute classic, or rather, the many reasons of a film that does everything it puts its mind to very well indeed.

To Kill a Mastermind (1979)

One of those huge cults of martial arts assassins that tend to plague the martial world in wuxia films has grown to become a huge threat for peace and stability throughout the whole of China. The cult is controlled by a mastermind so secretive, none of his underlings have ever seen him. He only communicates with his the eight chiefs stationed in his headquarters via a curious mechanical contraption, commanding them to do the most important dirty deeds.

Things have grown so bad, the emperor has ordered a group of men to find and kill the mastermind at all costs. Apart from the villains’ secrecy, there’s the little problem that the cult’s leaders are not to be beaten through a simple frontal assault, so the emperor's men work with the tools of espionage, subterfuge, and suicide attacks – all in an attempt to turn the leaders against one another.

In fact, the good guys, such as they are, appear to have managed to place an agent inside of the highest ranks of the cult. Their identity, however, is so secret, even the audience will only learn it during the final battle, when hopefully the mastermind’s identity will be revealed as well.

Wuxia films, particularly once Chor Yuen got into the genre at the Shaw Brothers, often have a particular closeness to the mystery genre (unless Jimmy Wang Yu, stars, of course), and the search for a mysterious mastermind certainly was a pretty standard genre trope at least during the 70s.

However, the approach Sun Chung (working from a script by Ni Kuang, who wrote about a million wuxia scripts, and novels) takes here is markedly different from the more typical tale of Ti Lung walking around the martial world, asking questions and getting into fights until the final showdown, and seems to take many of its cues from procedural spy material, while subtracting charismatic figures like George Smiley or Harry Palmer from the equation.

Instead, this is a film that spends a third of its time with nameless, thankless officials giving their lives for a goal that seems perpetual out of reach, and two thirds with eight – and then increasingly fewer – paranoid killers losing patience with one another.

It’s an interesting and uncommon way to go about it, but also one that leaves the film at hand without any visible centre. There is no clear protagonist, and because the mastermind stays hidden throughout, there’s no central antagonist here either. The film emphasises this even more by eschewing any of the great – or even mid-level – Shaw stars. Everybody here is a somewhat nameless character actor – all very capable when asked, all great in the fight scenes – so there’s nobody for an audience member to project themselves onto.

This turns To Kill a Mastermind into a somewhat alienating experience, as if you’d watch a film from a place where a genre you know quite well worked under somewhat different rules you as a viewer can’t quite comprehend, and are not sure you want to.

If this is the film’s great success or its great flaw is probably more a question of personal taste than anything else. At the very least, it is certainly interesting to see so many standard tropes of the wuxia without the thing – people, it turns out! – that usually anchors them, floating in a strange sort of limbo of great fight sequences, its director’s sense for striking use of colour, and some of the prettier locations to be found in the Shaw corpus.

It’s certainly an interesting experience, and even if I more appreciate To Kill a Mastermind than love it, and am rather glad most wuxia have central characters, I am just as glad its peculiar kind of abstraction exists.

To Kill With Intrigue (1977)

Original title: 劍花煙雨江南

The Martial World. A group known as the Bee Faces (because they really love to put human-faced bees on tattoos and poison darts, as one does) attacks the birthday of Martial World big muck Lei Chi Fung (Ma Chi), in revenge for an attempt at wiping out the Bee Faces fifteen years ago Lei Chi Fung instigated.

Lei’s son Hsiao Lei (Jackie Chan) learns of the attack plans early on, and does his best to drive birthday guests and peers alike away by acting like an ass, instead of, oh, telling them the truth. He does the same with Chin Chin (Yu Ling-Lung), the servant girl carrying his child. He has secretly asked his friend Chen Chun (Shin Il-Ryong), the Vagabond of the Martial World, to take care of her if he doesn’t make it, so we can’t blame him for lacking foresight as well as emotional maturity.

In something of an ironic twist, Hsiao Lei is going to be the only survivor of the massacre of his family, for the leader of the Bee Faces – whom we later learn to be called Ting Chan Yen (Hsu Feng) – spares his life. She also tells him that his father may not always have been the pillar of virtue he knew him as, a deep scar on her face he gave her during the death of her parents, the leaders of the Bee Faces, when she was just five years old speaking to that.

Her reasons for sparing Hsiao Lei despite her far superior kung fu are complicated. In part, she appears to see how much her own act of killing his parents mirror the acts she kills them for; in part she’s rather smitten with him; and in the part she’s actually saying out loud, she’s going to watch him suffer under the sad fate of his family.

During the following weeks, she’s certainly going to stalk Hsiao Lei, in turns declaiming dramatically, repeatedly saving his skin, or just watching him longingly, creepily.

Hsiao Lei for his part is hell-bent on returning to Chin Chin. However, it turns out his good friend Chen Chun might not be as trustworthy a man as he believes him to be. The characters will also get involved in the troubles of the Dragon Escort group of Dragon Five (George Wang Chueh), the nicest guy in the martial world. You can imagine what he’ll eventually get for that.

Much of what has been written about this Jackie Chan wuxia made shortly before Chan would start developing his distinctive screen persona (well, actually two personas, if you ask me) is focussing on blaming Lo Wei’s film for not being “A Jackie Chan Movie”. It certainly isn’t, but once you’ve got over the shock that Jackie was working as a martial artist/actor here and not as the movie star he’d turn into, you should be able to appreciate the film for what it is.

Particularly since “what it is”, is a fantastic late 70s wuxia, full of characters whose internal life is fully externalized through larger than life melodrama, martial artists that are all so utterly committed to their fighting bits that dressing in colour-coded group togs or using floating coffins for one’s entrance just is a normal Tuesday for them. Everybody has a fantastic sense of fashion and style as well, starting with Ting Chan Yen’s generally mono-coloured gowns and certainly not ending with even random assassins walking around with the most striking red hats, all the better to get a dramatically shot entrance.

The martial arts choreography is wonderful as well, combining some great “realistic” skills with moments of fantastic imagination. Ting Chan Yen going at a group of villains with knives is a thing to behold, as is a moment concerning an assassin, a tree, a sharp object and a Jackie kick you have to see to believe. Things are appropriately brutal when they need to be – the main villain’s death is particularly gruesome in that regard.

All of this takes place in front of impressive backdrops. Lo makes incredible use of South Korean locations that are a real selling point for the cinema of a small place like Hong Kong, where the regular viewer often feels acquainted with every nook and cranny a wuxia could be shot in. Lo uses the opportunity to get properly wide-screen staging fights in the most spectacular surroundings he can find, and really making every shot count there.

On a narrative level, this is very much a wuxia where the easy distinctions between good and evil tend to be unclear and shifting, and even good deeds like what Ting will eventually do for Hsiao Lei will be done in the cruellest possible way. In this world, the woman who killed one’s parents can be much more trustworthy than one’s best friend. Of course, the film knows that the death of Hsiao Lei’s parents is the end of Ting’s very own revenge flick, and shows us what happens after the revenge, or rather, the confusion when one survives the only act one has lived for.

Hsu Feng’s portrayal of Ting is highly effective, hitting the high melodramatic notes the film’s tone needs but also showing the nuances of her deeply complicated feelings. There’s an intensity to her performance Chan at this stage can never quite reach, and while he certainly isn’t bad here, he simply can’t match the complexity of anger, longing, and sadness his co-star exudes, and often comes over as just as bit sulky in comparison.

So, instead of reading this as an unsuccessful Jackie Chan vehicle, I rather see To Kill with Intrigue as an excellent Hsu Feng film, and one of Lo Wei’s visually most arresting films.

The Phantom Killer (1981)

Original title: 粉骷髏

Siu Fong (Wai Pak) is a bit of a local hero in a Chinese town ever since he fought off the bandits once lording it over the place. Because he’s also as pretty as he is boring, every single one of the town’s single ladies is swooning after him. Siu, however, has only eyes for the equally boring Sin Sin (Lee Yuen-Wa).

While Siu Fong’s gallivanting around the country probably doing something heroic, boringly, a series of murders of young women strikes our town. Curiously enough, all the victims were particular fans of Siu Fong; even more curiously, once he is back in town, the victims seem to be killed shortly after having cornered him to flirt with him.

At first, the chief of the local guard, Captain Chiu (Eddy Ko Hung), suspects Siu Fong. But various plot developments soon dissuade him from that theory. Why, perhaps the killer might be a woman trying to get rid of her rivals for that perfect man’s attentions, perhaps even a crazed Sin Sin?

I do have a place in my heart for films that mix wuxia and tales of detection, even more so when they, as Stanley Fung Sui-Fan’s The Phantom Killer does, add pleasant flourishes of the macabre to proceedings. The titular killer dresses up like a skeletal monk to commit their crimes – and their true nature is even more beautifully improbable – and there’s a whole line of inquiry about a corpse deposited in a statue, a worker in clay who sleeps in a coffin, and other elements of that nature.

Unfortunately, the macabre elements, as well as the mystery plot, suffer from the same syndrome as the film’s protagonist – they sound a lot more interesting than they turn out to be in practice.

Siu Fong’s just too bland to be interesting, and while he’s certainly physically attractive, Wai Pak projects all the personality of a freshly whitened wall. This even continues on into his kung fu style, that’s also technically flawless yet also – in a bizarre turn of events for one of the Venoms (Brother Snake) – lacking in any personality.

The macabre elements aren’t quite as struck with mediocrity as the protagonist – you can only make a skeletal monk piloted by a SPOILER so uninteresting – but director Fung certainly doesn’t use them as well as they deserve. Again, there’s nothing actively bad about the direction – it just lacks personality to a nearly improbable degree.

All of this does not mean The Phantom Killer is unwatchable, it’s just wasting some great ideas on boring competence.

Three Films Make A Post: Got a pencil? Take this down. Tomorrow you die.

Hit Man (2023): To my eyes, Richard Linklater’s perfectly decent comedy has been more than a little overhyped. It’s very Linklater in many ways, starting with the typical “I would like to be Eric Rohmer, alas I’m American” style of its dialogue scenes (do I need to mention that I loathe Rohmer’s dialogue style?), the same view on American culture he has had for the last decades, the slick but a bit empty style, and the grand gesture Linklater traditionally likes to present decent but not exactly terribly exciting ideas with.

This doesn’t mean this is a bad movie – like most everything Linklater ever did, this is an eminently watchable and entertaining piece of work, just not one that connects with me on any level beyond my appreciation for its rather unexciting craftsmanship.

Zu: (The) Warriors from the Magic Mountain aka 新蜀山劍俠 (1983): When it came out, Tsui Hark’s wuxia extravaganza was a core movie in the introduction of at the time state of the art special effects techniques to Hong Kong cinema that gifted us the joys of the wire fu style of wuxia (among other things). Not all of the film’s effects have aged gracefully, but the film throws so many at the audience that you’ll only have to blink and get to the next one; plus, many of the effects are of such insane and lovely conception, their actual quality isn’t too important to me.

Of course, the film’s absolutely unrelenting pace can be a bit of a difficulty if a viewer is in the wrong mood or prone to headaches, something that isn’t helped by its love for throwing barely comprehensible philosophical concepts at the viewer in the same tempo it does everything else.

It’s all a bit like having one’s head bashed in with a bag of the best candy one has ever eaten. In the right mood, that’s not a criticism coming from me.

P.I. Private Investigations (1987): For much of its running time, Nigel Dick’s film is the epitome of the competent-but-not-more thriller in the Hitchcockian style. Dick’s direction is slick, Los Angeles is Los Angeles, and Clayton Rohner’s whiny rich boy protagonist the kind of guy I’m pretty happy to see suffer a bit – it’s that kind of film, and he’s no Cary Grant.

From time to time, however, there’s a hiccup in the conventional slickness, and the film goes off in strange directions for half a scene or so – a chase is interrupted by our protagonist randomly stumbling into a heist, a dream sequence intrudes for no good reason – that keep it away from boring competence syndrome.

Black Invitation (1969)

Original title: 黑帖

China, the outskirts of the Martial World, where a gang of mediocre bullies is a major threat. After four years of wandering, major servant’s son Nian Zhu (Pai Ying) returns to the community he left for reasons of broken hearts and personal dignity. He doesn’t appear to come back with anything more than the shirt he left in on his back and a somewhat ratty looking umbrella. In truth, Nian Zhu has learned rather awesome kung fu, but has taken his master’s lessons about not using violence to heart so deeply, he’ll go out of his way to hide his abilities. That’ll cost a lot of people, obviously.

But really, how much kung fu does a man need to reconnect with his father (Kao Ming) and the lady love (Han Hsiang-Chin) who waited for him – and who is the adoptive daughter of his father’s patrician boss?

Turns out quite a bit of kung fu, for our protagonist’s old home is under threat from a group of bandits living and working in the nearby hills. Said bandits have been terrorizing the local communities for some time now. Their modus operandi is to send out the titular “black invitations” with their money and rich people’s daughters and mistresses wish list, and come down hard on anyone resisting. Apart from the kind of kung fu that’d get them kicked off the movie early in many another kung fu film, the bad guys also utilize the least subtle spy available, traitorous, not the least bit suspicious Wan Ren-Mei (Wan Chung-Shan).

Somehow, it will take a whole movie to take these guys down, with a couple of kidnappings and the usual scenes of the non-violent hero getting tortured before that blissful state of ass-kicking can be achieved.

In some regards, Chou Hsu-Chiang’s Taiwanese martial arts movie Black Invitation feels as if it were a predecessor to the thoughtful mid-period style of the great King Hu. It is at least much more concerned with philosophical concerns and the personal drama of Nian Zhu’s past and relationships than with pulling the audience from one fight to the next. In the early stages of the film, this works rather well, partially because Pai Ying very capably embodies the emotional weight of a world-weary homecoming through every expression and movement. There’s an effective sense of melancholia running through the early parts of the film, of lives not lived to their best, and certainly not their fullest, of youthful idealism getting ground down by a world that simply doesn’t care.

The more the film needs to integrate its more traditional wuxia plot, the less interesting it becomes. Not because there’s anything wrong with integrating the emotional-philosophical with the martial arts tropes, but because the film’s martial arts elements never really convince. The villains are less than impressive, so much so they never feel like the threat everybody around treats them as.

Worse, the martial arts scenes have a couple or three fun ideas, but their execution is much below what you can expect from a Taiwanese film of this era. It is difficult to say if the choreography (apparently by Pai Ying himself) is the problem, for Chou cuts away from all moments of impact and stages every single action scene in a way that hides forms, postures, and movement, as if this were an early 80s low budget martial arts movie made in the US.

This is particularly frustrating because the first one and a half acts are fine indeed, the melodrama perhaps a little stiff but the film’s approach to its protagonist’s plight genuinely moving; the rest of Black Invitation however, leaves much to be desired.

Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981)

aka The Thrilling Sword

aka Heaven Sword

Original title: 神劍動山河

When his wife dies giving birth to a red, oval, pulsating flesh egg, the ruling king of wherever this takes place (Chin Han) decides to get rid of the thing by doing the old Moses bit. The egg (cocoon?) finds its way to The Seven Dwarfs of the Happy Forest (seriously) who quickly learn there’s a healthy human baby girl inside of the fleshy exterior. They decide to raise her as their daughter.

Seventeen years later, our heroine (I believe the delightfully named Fanny Fang Fang-Fang) has grown up to be beautiful, morally pure, and so on. She becomes involved in her birth father’s business again by fate: meeting a heroic prince (Liu Shang-Chien) of the king’s realm and falling in love with him are one. Her feelings are reciprocated, and things could be set for a very quick happy end, if not for the fact that the king has invited two heroic exorcists to his court who are actually a couple of evil, devil worshipping magicians. These two are trying to usurp his throne by all means necessary, after having won the king’s trust by beating monsters they have conjured up themselves and by attacking his counsellors in front of him. Turning heroic princes into embarrassed looking bears, mind-controlling lost daughters and other acts of bizarre fiendishness are all in the program. Fortunately there’s help for the lovers: apart from the dwarfs, who are actually transformed generals, there’s a tiny, magic-wielding fairy willing to go out of her way to help, as well as a ridiculous looking sword that shoots laser beams (paired with an equally ridiculous looking armour), and other whacky nonsense.

Apparently, this Taiwanese fantasy wuxia variant of Snow White (or a Taiwanese version of the same folk tale model) directed by Chang Hsin-Yi is meant as a kids movie. This certainly tracks with other kids movies from the country I’ve encountered, seeing as it is both inexplicable and weird, and seems to be made for the kind of kids you probably wouldn’t want to encounter in the dark. Or really by day – they might shoot laser beams at you.

The whole thing is a WTF movie of the highest degree: it makes its folk tale sources as weird as possible (as if folk tales weren’t already strange enough), adding inexplicable flourishes, scenes of the kind of goofy nonsense some grown-ups believe kids find funny, bits and pieces of other popular fantasy movies – apart from Hong Kong, Chinese sources and Disney, I bet somebody here has seen their share of Harryhausen films and peplum – and random stuff whose reason to be in the movie – or anywhere else - is dubious and inexplicable (in the sense of “please, don’t explain”).

There are so many questions here, from the obvious, “what’s with the horrifying looking chicken bird/whatever muppet pet the dwarfs keep?” to more exalted ones like “why do the devil icons with the lightbulb eyes our baddies converse with have additional mouths in their crotches?”, or “where does a bear costume so bad, it looks actually embarrassed by itself even come from?”.

The movie is certainly not going to answer them, and I’m a little afraid to speculate. It is easier, and certainly more entertaining, to just let the film wash over one’s psyche like radiation. Very possibly, joy will sprout from your brain, like a flower in a Clark Ashton Smith story, when you realize the magic mirror from the folk tale has been replaced by a devil statue talking through its crotch mouth, or encounter the frog person sirens and their buddy the mini-Rodan while our prince is on his quest, or simply try to keep up with bizarre leaps of logic and genre.

Added bonus joys are an awesome needle-dropped score, special effects that clearly care not a whit about how ridiculous they look, and so become impressive in their ridiculousness, a plot that can’t help but do everything, even a simple hero’s quest, as weirdly as possible, and direction that really goes out of its way to make everything look as weird as it should be.

Chess Boxing Matrix (1989)

aka Chivalric Tornado

aka Labyrinth of Death

aka Vampire Strikes Back

Original title: 小俠龍捲風

Seven hundred years before the start of the main narrative, a character that appears to be called Sword God or Sword Master but is very clearly female (Ti Yu-Neung), traps one Evil king (who is indeed as not very nice as his name promises) in some sort of magical contraption that also connects him to a family of jiang shi. After a thousand years, the jiang shi will apparently be purified and allowed to go on to something better.

Because watching people squirm below movie laser shows for a thousand years would get a bit boring eventually, the jing shi and Evil king are freed three hundred years too early. Evil king, not surprisingly given his name, does start in on a new reign of terror, subjugating random weirdos with his laser shooting eyes. His first goal is to get ahold of the little boy of the jiang shi family, for the Sword God has deposited some sort of magical sword in the bad guy’s heart that only the little boy can melt or something.

A group of, mostly kid, heroes does come together to fight Evil king and his minions, while the jiang shi child says “pa-paaaaaaa” a lot.

This bit of Taiwanese martial arts/wuxia/what the hell madness may or may not be meant as a piece of children’s fantasy – the humour and the protagonists suggest as much – but one can’t help but worry about what any child would make of this series of fights, fights, laser shows, non-sequiturs and utter weirdness. Probably art.

For most of the time, this grown-up viewer had only the slightest idea of what was going on, who any of these people were, and what the hell they thought they were doing – a state of affairs certainly not helped by the sort of classic Hongkong and Taiwanese subtitles that seem to have been written by someone who does understand neither Mandarin nor English. Though, to be fair, I don’t think getting more detailed exposition would make this thing more explicable, seeing as how director Wang Chih-Cheng doesn’t like scenes of people talking for more than twenty seconds, and basically runs from one fight full of cheap and cheery visual effects of the good old drawn on lasers and other colourful explosions type to the next, with characters popping in and out of places and scenes seemingly at random. Most of the time, things are very weird indeed, so weird that stiff-armed jiang-shi kung fu and the running “gag” in which Mother Jiang-Shi gets sexually aroused during various fights hardly register on the strangeness scale. A lot of this comes so fast, so furious and with so little sense of control at you, it becomes hard to even describe much of that stuff without becoming reduced to making infantile noises.

So let’s just say that this movie contains a scene where a little boy jiang-shi plays torero (complete with a little red cape) against a gentlemen in a costume which at once suggests a ram and a train (what with smoke coming out of the ears and from the horns), only to get rudely interrupted by an evil tree person. If that doesn’t scream quality, I don’t know what does.

But seriously, while Chess Boxing Matrix makes not a lick of sense, is of dubious taste and has all the dramatic instincts of, well, a ram, it is a pretty incredible experience when a viewer is in the right mood; specifically if that mood is one where you only want to look at lots of backflips, Taiwanese people jumping and kicking non-stop for ninety minutes, and whatever weird flourish the filmmakers come up next to make one minute of non-stop fighting distinguishable from the next, all shot and edited with a violent hatred of anything ever standing still.

The Swordsman in Double Flag Town (1991)

aka Swordsmen in Double Flag Town

Original title: 雙旗鎮刀客

A teenage boy named Hai Ge (Gao Wei) travels through the deserts of Northwest China to a village known as Double Flag Town. On his deathbed, his swordmaster father told Hai Ge about the girl that’s supposedly been promised by her father to marry him. She’s the daughter of an old companion of Hai Ge’s father (the film actually uses the term “uncle” to describe the man, but everybody here’s called “uncle” or “sister” by basically everyone else, so he’s probably not an uncle by blood), but the only things our protagonist actually knows about her is that she must be about his own age, has a father with a lame leg, and a mole on her butt. This not being a comedy, Hai Ge concentrates his search on the thing with the leg.

It isn’t actually all that difficult to find the two, even for a shy and naïve young guy like Hai Ge. Other problems arise, though: both Lame Uncle (Chang Jiang) and his daughter Hao Mei (Zhao Ma-Na) start out deeply unimpressed by the young man. Though Uncle does give him a job and a place to stay, he’s not willing to marry off his daughter to a nobody she very much doesn’t want to marry, at first. During life in the closed-off little community that is apparently regular visited by duelling swordspeople, and is dominated from afar by the murderous Lethal Swordsman (Sun Haiying, I believe), Hao Mei’s heart softens towards Hai Ge.

Before things can properly develop there, the little brother of the Lethal Swordsman attempts to rape Hao Mei. Hai Ge uses his surprisingly great swordsmanship to defend her, killing the would-be rapist. Alas, killing the brother of a guy like the Lethal Swordsman is not a healthy thing – not only for Hai Ge and Hao Mei, but for the village as a whole as well. It is doubtful that Hai Ge can win a duel against a swordsman this, ahem, lethal, but running away might mean the end of everybody else in the village.

Far too few wuxia films use the Chinese Northwest or a Silk Road setting, so I’m always happy to stumble over one, especially when it is as interesting a movie as – recently deceased – He Ping’s Swordsman in Double Flag Town. Officially taking place in the Chinese West, this is as much influenced by Westerns, particularly the more abstract of the Italian Westerns, as it is by wuxia cinema of its time.

So instead of long, artfully choreographed, non-realistic martial arts battles, this is a film where scenes of guys eyeing one another – in Hai Ge’s case often as fearfully as befits him being a kid and not a grown-up – end in short explosions of quick violence. He Ping loves to hide those behind quick cuts, or, in the finale, a dust cloud, until the slow dropping of a body explains who actually won the fight. Which does of course also have parallels in Japanese cinema.

Where wuxia is traditionally colourful and set in clean – at worst artfully cobwebbed – locations and sets, everything here is realistically grimy and dusty; people look like people eking out their living in the desert do probably look, so there’s a decisive lack of glamour.

Still, the film never feels like one of those dreaded attempts at making a “realistic” wuxia (or western, or chanbara). Rather, it uses what could be flags of realism as its own way of stylizing things when it then shoots them in a surprisingly slick early 1991 visual style, where a synthesizer score doing slightly shifted westerns score riffs feels absolutely appropriate.

On a narrative level, this is a rather minimalist work that eschews huge backstories and monologues in favour of suggestion and archetype efficiently as well as effectively. This is not a film of many words, or one that wants to explain its philosophy to you, but rather one that knows a viewer will understand its morality as well as the emotional price characters here pay for decent actions without it emphasizing any of this.

So often, this feels more like a mood turned film than a detailed narrative, a minimalist, but elegant picture that demonstrates the moral parallels between Western and wuxia by working exactly where these genres meet.

Three Films Make A Post: Like a sudden, terrifying scream… Suspense shatters the Screen!

Foreign Intrigue (1956): Well, suspense certainly didn’t shatter my screen when watching Robert Mitchum’s European vacation as directed by Sheldon Reynolds, what with the total absence of suspense from the film. This certainly wants to be a Hitchcockian or Third Man style type of film, showing Mitchum travelling all over Europe to find out the secret of his deceased employer, but in practice, this is way too comfy an affair for that. Mitchum strolls through Europe amiably, kissing the girls and sometimes punching the guys, but Sheldon never manages to build up much actual suspense. From time to time, the director hits on an atmospheric shot or two, but the script is never bothering with making the mystery Mitchum chases actually interesting, leading to a slow and comfy kind of Eastman Colour chase. For certain moods, there’s something to be said for a leisurely amble, of course, just don’t expect much of an actual movie going in.

Mulan (2020): Of course, there’s slow and kinda likeably boring like that old Mitchum vehicle, and then there’s this remake of the Disney animation based on the Chinese tale as directed by Niki Caro. It’s slow, lacking in charm and visual imagination and does nothing better, or even just as well, as even a proper Chinese, Taiwanese or Hong Kong wuxia from the third line of that genre (let’s not even speak of the good ones), wasting Donnie Yen, Gong Li, Jet Li, and so on and so forth on things they could do in their sleep.

This is also a good example that simply throwing money at your blockbuster doesn’t necessarily make it watchable. Even in the highly commercial arena of the big loud film for international audiences, you need creative vision. If you don’t have that, you get a very loud version of what my brain does when my feet are falling asleep, or, as Disney called it, Mulan.

Congo (1995): Let’s not end this trilogy of films of dubious quality on a positive note this time around. Instead, let’s talk about Frank Marshall’s supposed love letter to the classic adventure movie and its serial siblings based on the insufferable Michael Crichton. It’s got a talking ape in it, and I’m half convinced it was also written by one (sorry to all talented writing gorillas out there). What it doesn’t have is dramatic tension, a script that’s more than a long string of nonsense, action sequences worth their name, or any enjoyment factor. I do appreciate that somebody involved in the production at some point (this is one of those films with a million script versions by dozens of writers, none of whom is in the credits, because US unions are weird about crediting the people doing the actual work) tried to update some classic adventure tropes, giving us Ernie Hudson as a tough and at least semi-competent leader, and Laura Linney getting to be a two-fisted adventurer.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film is still terrible, featuring mawkish sentimentality next to badly staged action sequences and dialogue I can only ascribe to a gorilla.