Fantasy Mission Force (1983) June 25, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Wacko , 4 commentsDirector: Chu Yen-Ping Main Cast: Brigitte Lin; Jimmy Wang Yu; Suen Yuet; Jackie Chan Territory: Taiwan/Hong Kong Production Company: Cheng Ming Film Company
When an international gaggle of generals (sorry, I don’t know the collective noun for generals) is captured by the Japanese during World War II, Captain Duan Hun (Jimmy Wang Yu) heads up a special task force to go and get them back. The task force is comprised of a woman with a rocket launcher, her Casanova of a lover, two Chinese Scots guards who seem to be in love with each other (one of whom swings a morning star throughout the movie), a vagabond thief with a Mexican moustache and a guy who doesn’t do anything except look cool in sunglasses.
Fantasy Mission Force plays like a weird experiment: imagine a film where a bunch of scriptwriters, some of them with mental health issues, work on a script in isolation of each other with no knowledge of what the other was writing except for a list of character names and a vague outline of who they are and what they’re doing. That’s what this film feels like. Either that or a film scripted by aliens who had seen a bunch of Earth movies (including Raiders of the Lost Ark) but had never actually met any humans.
Either way, it’s completely mad. It seems to be defeating the object a little to point out exactly why it’s one of the craziest films I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s set in World War II but features cars made in the late 70s. Yes, there is a tribe of Amazon women in a film set in Asia. Yes, Brigitte Lin blows up her own home in a fit of anger for no apparent reason. But that doesn’t quite sum up how decidedly odd it is. Watching it now, I’m not sure if it’s just too clever and we just don’t get it.
When the government is presenting a slide-show of possible leaders of the task force to rescue the hostages we see some familiar faces flash up on screen and the reason they can’t be used for the mission: James Bond (“on assignment in South Africa”), Snake Plissken (“King of Snake is dead”), Baldy from the Aces Go Places series (“he is deflective”) and my personal favourite, Rambo – where they use a promotional shot of Sylvester Stallone dressed as Rocky Balboa.
This is one of those films where you can get bogged down in “this happens” then “that happens” kind of descriptions to try to illustrate what’s going on, but you could be here for weeks. We have a broad (and yes, I do mean broad) spectrum of styles on offer in this film from comedy to horror to action. Films that mix genres rarely work, and this is true to a certain extent of this film, but when you take each piece on its own merit, it’s surprising how much is actually pulled off. For instance, there’s a scene in a haunted house that is both played for laughs and for frights and this scene in particular is pretty damn good. The humour is funny and there’s also a weird sense of menace to it. Similarly, the introduction of Suen Yuet’s character with a bonkers but catchy song (with “Ha Ha Ha! Lai Lai Lai!” refrain) complete with smiling but baffled gwailos is a highlight that no one forgets. Ever. Thankfully, it’s been immortalised on YouTube and can be seen here in full. My only major criticism is the tone seems to shift the moment one of the Amazon women gets killed and her blood flies across someone’s face. It seems out of place and brutal in a film that up to that point was quite light in tone. There are also bloody moments later on, but that moment always sticks out in my mind.
Fantasy Mission Force is a film that would almost definitely have been long forgotten by now were it not for one fact: Jackie Chan appears in it. He weaves in and out of the story in a way meant to disguise the fact that he wasn’t present for most of the shoot. Everyone probably knows the story by now, but Jackie “owed” Wang Yu a couple of films for a favour Wang did in “negotiating” a release for Jackie from the Lo Wei studio. It has to be said that Jackie seems to take it all in good fun, and his highlight is his show of one-upmanship before a wrestling bout with a fearsomely big man.
But if you’ve come solely to see Jackie, it’s very likely you’ll be disappointed – he’s just not in it nearly enough and he clearly wasn’t able to spend as much time as normal getting the most out of his action scenes (the exact same problem that occurred on his other Wang Yu film Island Of Fire). If you’re a fan of truly out there films, though, it’s quite likely you’ll find nirvana here – nowhere else will you see Nazis, Amazons, singing vagabonds, Chinese Scotsmen who have a very close relationship, ghosts cheating at Mah-Jong and apparent time travel all in one movie. And that, my friends, is guaranteed.
Angel (1987) June 21, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Action, 1980s films , add a commentDirector: Raymond Leung; Tony Leung Siu-Hung; Ivan Lai Main Cast: Saijo Hideki; Moon Lee; Elaine Liu; Oshima Yukari; Alex Fong; David Chiang; Hwang Jang-Lee Territory: Hong Kong Production Company: Molesworth Limited Production
If Pedicab Driver is one of the finer examples of Hong Kong action cinema in the 80s, then Angel is probably just as far in the other direction.
The script-by-numbers is the main problem, along with indifferent direction. Gangsters want to produce enough drugs to sell to the world; a small bunch of heroes wants to stop them. Throw in some high-ranking police officers that have been kidnapped by the gang and you have the whole plot in a nutshell. The “Angels” of the title are an obvious reference to Charlie’s Angels, only this time you have a visible boss (in the form of Shaw Brothers veteran David Chiang) and a male Angel (Saijo Hideki).
The ladies come in the form of Moon Lee and Elaine Liu. It has to be said that the latter does not look as if she wants to be there at all, and seems particularly uncomfortable with the action scenes. Moon Lee has the moves but is just too cute to cut it as an action star. She tries to convey intensity and fury, but only ends up looking cuter the angrier she gets. Watching a pissed-off Moon Lee is like watching an enraged kitten – it’s not scary and you end up just wanting to pet it until it’s in a more temperate mood.
Not all the women are Angels – Japanese bad girl Oshima Yukari plays the lead muscle of the crime syndicate and gets to show off her moves as well. But it’s her partner in crime Hwang Jang-Lee that steals the show. He has a couple of great scenes, and is easily the best thing in the film. Why he wasn’t given a bigger part is beyond me.
Apart from Hwang Jang-Lee, the only other highlights are a couple of decent stunts, one involving climbing up the outside of a skyscraper. The rest left me feeling extremely unsatisfied. There’s also a sense of the film being steered in different directions (well, it had no fewer than three directors, so maybe that’s not surprising). For example, it seems to me that clues are planted that the American DEA Officer is a turncoat working with the drug ring, but confusingly this never actually happens and it turns out he’s on the level after all.
All-too-brief highlights aside, Angel can’t really be recommended to the casual fan. But if you’re really into the girls-with-guns sub genre of Hong Kong action cinema, you may want to have a look. And yes, Moon Lee really is that cute.
Pedicab Driver (1989) June 18, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Comedy, Action, 1980s films , 2 commentsDirector: Sammo Hung Main Cast: Sammo Hung; Nina Li Chi; Mang Hoi; Max Mok; Fennie Yuen; John Shum; Suen Yuet Territory: Hong Kong Production Company: Bojon Films
Pedicab Driver marks the end of Sammo Hung’s greatest period as both star and director with a mighty bang. Although it seems at times to be a little over-ambitious in its storytelling, with several seemingly unrelated threads working parallel with each other, it does actually work most of the time.
The movie’s opening is definitely one of the finest pieces of Hong Kong cinema, and I defy anyone to disagree. The setting is Macau in the 1930s; two rival gangs of pedicab (passenger-carrying tricycles similar to rickshaws) drivers meet in a teahouse for negotiations, divvying up passengers. The discussion is bitter and hostile, but the two parties eventually reach a cordial agreement. Just as they are able to shake hands on their new deal, the teashop owner, chasing a cat not visible to the gangs, leaps into view brandishing a deadly meat cleaver. Both gangs mistake this for an ambush and a fight ensues. The clash is reminiscent of the barroom brawl from Jackie Chan’s Project A, and features breathtaking action and fantastic inventiveness (there’s even a “lightsaber” duel with two fluorescent lighting strips!). This scene, as well as being incredibly exciting, also underlines Sammo’s generosity behind the camera – instead of hogging the limelight, he lets the others take the lion’s share of screen time for the duration.
After such an adrenaline rush, what follows immediately after could seem a huge let-down: baker Fong (Suen Yuet) tries to court his employee Ah Bing (Nina Li Chi) even though he’s old enough to be her father, while Tung (Sammo Hung) has much the same intention. Well, it’s Nina Li Chi - that’s pretty much every man’s intention.
Anyway, there’s also Master Ng (John Shum playing very much against type), a man so thoroughly evil he would make Hitler look reasonable. Seriously, he’s the most snarlingly evil pantomime villain in Hong Kong cinema, and there have been quite a few over the years. He is a pimp, and in one scene one of his workers is giving birth. He and his men kill the girl’s father (Dick Wei – so you know there are going to be a few fireworks before the end) in front of her as the baby’s being born, then tells them to throw the offspring in the river if it’s a boy and to take it back to the brothel if it’s a girl. He then tells the woman to get back to work.
Last but not least, we have fellow pedicab driver Malted Candy (Max Mok) and his romance with Hsiu Tsui (Fennie Yuen). It’s a somewhat melodramatic affair, this relationship, and is your typical Chinese tragic love story, complete with Cantopop song sung over a montage of the couple falling in love. I don’t know what Malted Candy was expecting of the poor girl. After all, he was initially attracted to her because she reminded him of a character from a pornographic novel he was reading.
While these story threads are certainly only diversions from the main spectacle (the fights), they do seem to enhance the film, and I hold this opinion despite my cynical and jaded nature. Actually, the love story between the star-crossed lovers only seems bearable while you’re watching the film – when you think about it before and after viewing the film it all seems so tackily contrived.
The action scenes are scattered sparingly throughout the film, but the one that stands out has no relevance to the plot whatsoever. Sammo crashes a gambling den and is challenged to fight the boss. Big deal, you might think, except the boss turns out to be Lau Kar-Leung and the fight is stunning. The time that passed between this and his Shaw Brothers heyday seems to have been kind to Lau, and no doubt out of respect for the elder, Hung lets Lau’s character win the bout.
The dramatic events that unfold near the end of the film pay off when Sammo and Rice Pudding (Mang Hoi) take revenge on Master Ng. I argue that the reliance on melodrama gives the film the right tone for this climax as Sammo goes apeshit at Ng’s mansion, taking on pretty much his entire gang (including Billy Chow – always worth watching in a Hung directed film) in a way that only Sammo knows how.
Pedicab Driver is one of the finest examples of 80s action in a Hong Kong film, and as many people cite that decade as the most impressive in turns of action choreography, that’s quite a recommendation. It’s frustrating that the movie isn’t out on DVD yet (legitimately, anyway) as it deserves a much higher profile. No doubt it’ll turn up one day, and those action scenes will blow away a whole new generation of fans.
Chokugeki! Jigoku-ken (The Executioner) (1974) June 12, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Comedy, Action, 1970s films , 3 commentsDirector: Teruo Ishii Cast: Sonny Chiba; Makoto Satô; Eiji Go; Yutaka Nakajima Territory: Japan Production Company: Toei Production Ltd
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a Sonny Chiba film on here. Although it seems like I’ve not been watching them, I have in fact been on a steady diet of Chiba since watching The Street Fighter way back on my first post for this blog. I’ve bought so many boxed sets of Chiba’s films that I now have no less than three copies of Killing Machine, two copies of Bullet Train, and two versions of Virus (which isn’t really a Sonny Chiba film but that doesn’t stop companies including it).
No, the reason I’ve not been writing about them is because so many of them (apart from the Street Fighter films) leave me completely cold. I think it’s something to do with the storylines and the scripts – something always feels a little “off” to me. Chokugeki! Jigoku-ken is no different – a disgraced police officer recruits a bunch of criminals to break up a drug ring – but at least it does have a certain flair.
Chiba is Ryuichi Koga, a trained ninja – although his “backstory” consists of a few short generic training sequences before we see him as a man, leaving his master. Along for the ride is a ruthless assassin (Makoto Satô), an overly horny murderer awaiting execution on death row (Eiji Go) and, to provide eye-candy, Street Fighter co-star Yutaka Nakajima.
The first indication that something’s slightly amiss is the introduction of Makoto’s character, which is borrowed almost directly from the introduction of Lee Van Cleef’s character in The Good the Bad and the Ugly. Well, if you’re going to borrow, I suppose you borrow from the best. However, Ryuichi then springs Eiji Go out of prison with the exact same chewing-gum-in-a-lock gag from obscure Hong Kong movie Interpol 009, which I just happened to have watched a few weeks ago. Odd.
Although the characters are strange (the horny ex-prisoner is particularly annoying and I’m still not sure why Yutaka Nakajima was in the film other than for her considerable beauty) and the story a little dull, it is a cut above a lot of similar fare as it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The comedy, although lowbrow, is actually pretty funny most of the time.
And then you’ve got the action sequences, which Chiba handles as well as you’d expect. They’re the highlight of the film, of course, and in that respect Chokugeki! Jigoku-ken is a winner, with fights breaking out on a regular basis. One pleasant surprise is the inclusion of Kurata Yasuaki, who will be instantly recognisable to every Hong Kong action film fan on the planet. Mr Kurata was the go-to guy for decades when Hong Kong filmmakers wanted a Japanese martial artist, and he even got to play non-villains once or twice. His place in Hong Kong cinematic history is secured with appearances in films such as Heroes of the East, Millionaire’s Express and Fist of Legend, and apparently he’s a really nice bloke too. I don’t know why, but I was actually surprised to see him in a Japanese film!
If you take away the fights, though, you can’t help but think this is all routine stuff. I know great scriptwriting isn’t the thing most people associate with action movies (especially from this part of the world) but it would have been nice to have something interesting to hang the fight sequences on other than some (admittedly funny) comic moments and quite a lot of gratuitous nudity.
This is definitely another example of a great film if you’re in a very undemanding mood. Just don’t expect cinematic gold. Oh, and by the way, does anyone want to buy a couple of copies of Killing Machine?
“King Hu’s A Touch of Zen” by Stephen Teo June 2, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Book Reviews , 6 comments
Asian action cinema tends to get a raw deal when it comes to serious critical analysis, so it is initially refreshing that Stephen Teo approaches the subject of King Hu’s magnum opus A Touch of Zen with a scholarly eye. The movie is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest achievement of the wuxia genre – an opinion that is reinforced by the fact that its influence is still obvious in films lauded as masterpieces by western audiences ignorant of the source material.
Previous works by the author made me a little wary of this book. Teo tends to overanalyse things in my opinion and his writing can be very “dry” and dispassionate. The book (119 pages in an approximately A5 sized book, with a further 50 or so pages of appendices and an index) is split into several chapters dealing with different segments of the film running roughly parallel with the film’s narrative.
By far the most interesting sections are the introduction and conclusion, where Teo sheds light on the film’s background with information I’ve not read anywhere else. We learn how the fantastically dilapidated Ching Lu Fort set was constructed and aged (with a flame-thrower, apparently!) and how the film’s failure at the box office (it only became successful after a screening at Cannes some years after release) led to the production company’s slow demise.
After reading the introduction, we are instructed to skip to the first appendix which gives a plot synopsis for the 17th century short story Xia Nü by Pu Songling, upon which certain elements of A Touch of Zen are based. After we return to the text, Teo begins psychoanalysing the work in earnest. He comes up with some great theories and discusses the symbolism on display in the film, even approaching the spider motif that crops up continuously throughout the film from different angles. Several times, he spots things that I’d completely missed or he points out cultural or linguistic subtleties that had completely gone over my head – especially on the subject of Zen itself and the character Hui Yuan’s rebirth, which was a complete revelation to me. Certain of his arguments do strike me as quite subjective, however, and Teo has a tendency to state his opinions as fact – a practice that can become frustrating to the reader.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in Teo’s repeated claims regarding the homosexuality (or bisexuality – Teo tends to use the terms interchangeably) of the lead male character Ku Shen-Chai (written as Gu Shengzhai in the text). In the short story, his bisexuality isn’t in question (he and the Ouyang Nian character become lovers), but Teo keeps insisting that this is also the case in the film adaptation, even going as far as to claim that A Touch of Zen is “a film of repressed bisexuality” – a claim I can see no evidence of whatsoever. Teo writes that Ku considers marriage “despite his homosexuality (which we perceive in the film but know to be a fact from the original story)”. However, my own reading of Ku’s reaction is that he seems keen on the idea of marrying Yang and is visibly disappointed when his mother tells him she doesn’t want to marry him. Teo argues that Hu “played down” the homosexual elements for political and cultural reasons but I feel that Hu simply did not include that element of the story at all. It seems more likely to me that the character Ku is an under confident, somewhat unambitious man (as seen by his constant rejection of the idea of applying for the governmental exam to become an officer) whose bumbling oafishness slowly dissolves after his first sexual encounter with Yang awakens the confident, scheming strategist that he would become. However, only once does Teo ponder the possibility that Hu may have written Ku as heterosexual and does not offer a single shred of evidence in support of his theory. We are also told of Ku’s supposed scopophilic tendencies and that “the spider denotes…a repressed scopophilic instinct”, but again there seems little hard evidence of this.
The theming of each chapter to a specific set piece of the film does occasionally feel as if you’re reading a hasty novelisation of the film, but Teo interjects his own thoughts and quotations from other critics and reviewers into the text along the way. Teo’s writing hasn’t become any more accessible, I’m sorry to say, and you may want to keep a dictionary handy for when he really start to let fly with his vocabulary. He breaks up the text with some very grainy monochrome screenshots from the movie (I’m betting he took the shots from the Tai Seng DVD) to help explain visually some of his points, and the aforementioned appendices offer a little more background (although feel more like padding) as well as copious notes at the end of the book.
I would have preferred more background on the film and less psychoanalysis. If you don’t believe wholly in what Teo tells us, you will have a hard time accepting some of his conclusions. However, the fact that the book exists at all is something of a minor victory as the film itself seems totally ignored today, and the book does rekindle the urge to go and revisit wuxia’s finest three hours.
Published by Hong Kong University Press - 2007.