Lethal Irritation: Rage against the meaningless two-word movie title August 10, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Articles, Humour , 5 commentsThere’s a blight in the world of action movies and for once it’s got nothing to do with the stars, the directors, the product placements, the stunts, the scripts, the choreography, etc.
I’m talking about the proliferation of the meaningless two-word film titles. It’s hardly a new phenomenon, but because the practice has been going on so long and there are only a finite number of appropriate “tough words” to choose from, it’s getting ever more difficult to sort them out in my brain. And for a genre often accused of being generic, the last thing we need is generic film titles too. Not learning from spoof titles like Naked Gun, Loaded Weapon and more recently Hot Fuzz, film executives are still trundling out the two-word monstrosities and there seems to be no end in sight.
What’s more, the practice has now become more commonplace in Hong Kong when they decide upon on English title for their film. I know for a fact I’m going to be on some internet forum at some point in the future and there’ll be a discussion on Fatal Contact and I’m going to say, “yeah, good film, one of Ringo Lam’s best” and someone will gently point out that that film was Full Contact while making a vulgar hand gesture into their monitor. And I can hardly wait for the Fatal Contact discussion: “hopeless film,” I’ll probably say, “CGI blood and Sammo was completely wasted,” while someone corrects me that the film I’m talking about is Fatal Move. See what I mean? All I need is someone to come up with a film called Full Move and I’ll be completely screwed. I had enough trouble in a recent post getting Island of Fire (about a prison) mixed up with Prison on Fire (also about a prison, I’ll admit) and that’s got three words.
As we’ve seen with SPL: Sha Po Lang (good title when you hear the explanation at the start of the film) being turned into Kill Zone for its US release, someone somewhere obviously thinks the two-word title sells, especially if it’s got absolutely bugger all to do with the film in question. I think it might be something to do with the trailers we’ve been force fed for so long. Imagine the Voice of God coming up with this for my upcoming masterpiece Fatal Termination:
“Bruce Chow is Jim Wu [action shot of actor with gun], a cop who plays by his own rules. He’ll do whatever it takes to bring to justice the government agency that left his nephew severely colour-blind [shot of sickly young kid in a wheelchair]. By any means he can [explosion]. A deadly secret [shot of actor in stealth mode]. A beautiful girl [starlet tosses her hair in front of another explosion]. A rookie partner from Greenland [Wu shouting at the Superintendent: “I don’t have time to train no wet-behind-the-ears Eskimo!”]. The roughest justice imaginable [more action shots and a few more explosions just to establish we’re not into Merchant Ivory territory]. From the deadly shores of Hong Kong [night shot of city: traditional oriental music plays over the top] to the frozen wastes of the north…to the sprawl of New York [Inuit sidekick: “man, it’s colder here than back home!”]. [Music swells and then silence] Fatal Termination [credits flash impossibly fast on screen. Then blackness].”
It can’t just be me that’s getting irritated and confused by these two-word shenanigans, but just to make sure, I’ve collected a bunch of the best (i.e. worst) together with some old favourites. The twist is, I’ve added a few creations of my own – mainly by just mixing the other titles up a bit. Some are obscure Hong Kong movies, some are well known, while some are your typical straight-to-video Seagal/Van Damme efforts. Can you tell which are the real titles and which are the bogus ones?
Flash Point
Extreme Challenge
Dragon Target
Full Contact
Renegade Force
Lethal Weapon
Fatal Move
Final Alert
Attack Force
Kill Shot
Fatal Contact
Maximum Weapon
Lethal Termination
Ballistic Kiss
Fatal Decision
Sudden Death
Terminal Velocity
Final Death
Black Eagle
Flash Shot
Dragon Heat
Hard Target
Attack Point
Sudden Target
Renegade Justice
First Risk
Full Alert
Dragon Weapon
Kill Zone
Final Decision
Body Weapon
Hot War
Excessive Force
Renegade Vacation
Terminal Invasion
Sudden Impact
Extreme Decision
Maximum Risk
Fatal Vacation
Excessive Heat
Final Justice
First Shot
Executive Decision
First Strike
Full Move
Moving Targets
As far as I know, there are twenty-eight genuine titles in amongst that lot. Happy hunting.
The films rights to Fatal Termination are still available.
“You stinky!” - Hong Kong’s funniest subtitles July 13, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Articles, Humour , 10 commentsOne peculiarity of Hong Kong films has always been the territory’s tradition of subtitling their films in Chinese and English. Chinese subs are necessary as dialects vary from place to place but the written form can be understood universally (theoretically, at least) and English subtitles seemed to have been law at one point but the practice still continues even though the colony is no longer under British rule. As the people who do the subtitles are Chinese, it’s not surprising that the translations can go awry at times – sometimes with hilarious consequences.
My introduction to Chinese subtitles probably came later in life than most fans. My first exposure to Hong Kong films was on TV, where they were subtitled perfectly; after that, I had to make do with horribly dubbed VHS tapes, and it wasn’t until I saw a freshly pirated copy of City Hunter that I became aware that Hong Kong subtitled its own films into English. It was a bit of shock after watching Channel 4’s meticulously worded subs to be faced with a line like: “oh, are they chewing gums or my hearing’s wrong?”
But it wasn’t until I saw Police Story 2 that the potential for comic interpretations became apparent. One bad guy shouts a command to his colleagues when Jackie gets the best of them: “Beat him out of recognisable shape!” From then on, I’ve been looking at Hong Kong subtitles in a different way…
The best ones aren’t necessarily the ones that are completely wrong or weird. In some ways, you can see that the subtitle makes perfect sense in itself; it’s just that no native speaker of this language would phrase it in such a way. And why the Chinese seem to think we have a bodily function we call “stooling” is beyond me. It’s odd because such things as typos are relatively rare, and when was the last time you read a Chinglish subtitle that mixes up “you’re” and “your” or “there” and “their”? I believe I’ve only seen one such mix up, and as native English speakers get them muddled up every day, that’s quite an achievement.
It’s not just the dialogue that can come to grief - sometimes the blurb on the back of the DVD box can raise a belly laugh or two. The following is taken verbatim from the back of the Hong Kong Universe DVD of The Protector (with apologies to all who have read my comments about this nugget before on the HKMDB):
“Super action star Jackie Chan being the Director and actor this time* in “The Protector”, co-starring Sally Yip and other action actress**.
New York policeman Billy Wong (Jackie Chan) chase after the gangsters who killed his partner on the ground, on the ramparts and in the air***. He investigates a kidnapped case to Hong Kong and discovers Mr. Big is the leader of the gangsters****. Finally, a big fireball lights up the beautiful harbour of Hong Kong”
*Erm, actually, James Glickenhaus is the Director, as it says elsewhere on the box.
**I guess the blurb writer wasn’t a fan of Moon Lee, who co-stars alongside Jackie…
***Jesus, what a day: first killed on the ground, then killed on the ramparts and then again in the air. No wonder Jackie’s after revenge.
****This completely ruins the tension in the movie: all along I was thinking Mr Henchman was the leader.
Some of the best Chinglish subtitles can be found in the book Sex and Zen & A Bullet In The Head by Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins, and I’ve tied to avoid duplication where possible. As this book is now twelve years old, I think it’s high time for some new ones to be copied and pasted throughout the Internet! I plan to write new articles with new subs when I’ve got enough together, and if any readers have got a howler they’d like to see on here, please email me on drunkenmaster42@hotmail.com. In the meantime, I present the following for your amusement.
Unreasonable requests and outlandish orders:
“Bump him to death” – From Beijing with Love
“Sock him, Fatty” – Pantyhose Hero
“Let me see how rude are you!” – Forbidden City Cop
“Carry a gun! Armed Rubbery!” – People’s Hero
“You’re under our encirclement” – Fatal Move (whatever happened to “we have you surrounded”?)
“Bastard, bump against me” – Pantyhose Hero
“Doctor, are you rude?” – Forbidden City Cop
“Follow that fatty! Run him down” – Pedicab Driver
“Let me rape you once and for all” – Pantyhose Hero
“Jin Si, your belly is open. Run” – The Heroic Ones
“Let’s gay” – Pantyhose Hero
Insults, abuse and fighting talk:
“Can I slap her heavily?” – Forbidden City Cop
“You stinky!” – Fatal Move
“Auntie, you talk like a whore” – Pedicab Driver
“Frankly, are you a girl or a pervert?” – Pantyhose Hero
“You want to beat me, I do want to hit you hardly with rod too” – Forbidden City Cop
“Fatty, how can you piss on the street?” – Enter the Fat Dragon
Just plain wrong:
“Keeps delaying rascally” – Fatal Move
“Damaged, it’s sharp” – Pantyhose Hero
“I really recognise his scent of smell” – Ebola Syndrome
“You have a gun, return him with a bullet!” – People’s Hero
“No, I have just stooled” – Lawyer, Lawyer
“Slash the boys like greens, you serious” – Fatal Move
“Cut off the crabs, I will kill you if you don’t pay” – Fantasy Mission Force
“Sorry, my orgasm” – Pantyhose Hero
“I am stooling” – Bio Zombie
“Was beaten up when I just walked in. Someone expelled me out” – Fatal Move
“It Banged, and a lot of people stooped down on the street” – People’s Hero
“What for? I don’t chew gums” – Interpol 009
“Those bastards drank the urine which I’ve added with cathartics” – Lawyer, Lawyer
I’m off to do some stooling now. Until next time, enjoy those subtitles!
Bruce Lee Vs Elvis: more “Game of Death” footage found April 1, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Uncategorized, Articles, Humour , 9 commentsA recently discovered film can containing a mere 10 minutes’ worth of material has already been hailed as the Holy Grail for both action film fans and music fans. The contents show the King of Kung Fu fighting the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in a life and death struggle set inside a Pagoda.
The footage is believed to be yet more material from Lee’s unfinished film Game of Death, shot in 1972. The project was only in its infancy when Lee was called upon to film Enter The Dragon for Warner Brothers, and Lee died before he could go back and complete the film. However, it has always been claimed that more material was shot than was ever seen, even taking into consideration the newly restored material that surfaced in recent documentaries on the subject.
The idea of Bruce Lee starring alongside Elvis Presley is not as far fetched as it sounds. Presley was a huge fan of Lee, and was himself a Karate practitioner under the tutelage of Lee’s friend Ed Parker. Presley expressed a wish to work with the Kung Fu star on a film project, but it had always been assumed that the two legends never met. However, the footage comes as no surprise to the Presley estate. “We know Elvis went to Hong Kong in 1972 to meet Bruce,” says a spokeman for the singing star, who died in 1977. “He wanted the visit to be very low-key as he was mindful of the hysteria that would follow if the Hong Kong people knew the two were meeting.”
Travelling under the name of Vince Everett, Presley spent a total of two weeks in Hong Kong filming with Lee. Full details of the found footage are being kept secret, but it is believed that the scene starts with Presley singing a musical number while Lee and co-star Nora Miao dance the Cha Cha – Lee was a spledind dancer in his youth and was even crowned the Hong Kong Cha Cha Champion of 1958. Unfortunately, the film was shot without sound, so the song Elvis is singing remains a mystery – for now. “There is dialogue, and it’s in English,” says another spokesman. “We’re working with lip-readers to discover what is being said and sung.”
After the song ends, it appears Lee and Presley have an argument, and the two start fighting, with Presley using Karate against Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. In all, the footage lasts just under ten minutes and contains fight choreography that one privileged viewer has said “will stun fans. It’s simply outstanding stuff, and Elvis is on fine form. When he breaks his guitar over Bruce’s head, it all goes nuclear. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
So why has the world not seen this amazing footage, and why did neither Lee or Elvis mention it? No one knows for sure, but one theory is that Lee was unhappy with the dancing element of the scene and wanted to reshoot it before presenting it to the world. As for why the footage was lost, there appears to be a simple explantion. “We have a large vault in which we store all our films,” explains an employee at the archive vault of Golden Harvest studios, where Lee made all his Hong Kong movies. “This particular reel was in a can where the writing on the label was completely obscured by a substance that looks like hamburger mustard. It was simply left in the vault until we were doing a cleanout and we decided to have a look at what was on it. Imagine our surprise when we found what it contained.”
And what will happen to the film now? Columbia Pictures distributed the Golden Harvest film Game of Death in 1978, five years after Lee’s death using stand-ins and archive footage to seemlessly build a new movie around the footage Lee had shot before leaving for the States to make Enter The Dragon. The result was so astonishingly successful that hardly anyone noticed that Lee was being played by a series of other actors and stuntmen. Columbia Pictures now wants to buy the film outright and insert the found footage – and shoot new scenes to explain the Presley character.
“We have found that we could not simply add the Elvis scene to the Pagoda section of the movie Game of Death,” said one high-ranking Columbia official. “His character needs explaining. We are therefore going to shoot new footage to help the flow of the revised film.” One problem is that many of the cast, and director Robert Clouse, have passed away since making the film, and the aging process makes it impossible to use the services of the surviving cast. “We have already aquired the services of an Asian-American actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tai Chung Kim [Lee’s stand in for the 1978 shoot] to play Billy Lo, and we will use archive footage and outtakes to fill in the gaps with the other actors.”
Columbia have gone even further by hiring an unknown actor to direct the new material. Matt Conroy was given the job as he looked eerily similar to Robert Clouse in the late 70’s. Conroy has not directed a single frame of film, and after studying Clouse’s back catalogue, which includes such genre classics as Gymkata and China O’Brien 2, was initially worried he may have been over-qualified. However, he has now embraced the challenge: “There’s no getting around the fact that I look like the guy,” says Conroy, “and the producers are insisting that they want someone as close, physically, to Bob Clouse. I will do my best and try not to let anyone down.”
It is not known at this point who will play Elvis in the re-shoot, but with an estimated 85,000 professional impersonators in the world there shouldn’t be too much trouble finding someone for the role. As for the outcome of the duel, executives are keeping their lips firmy sealed. “You’ll have to wait and see,” says an excited official. “But this is going to be huge!”
The revised version of Game of Death is scheduled to hit cinemas worldwide exactly one year from today – on April 1, 2009.
Curse of the Movie Collector May 7, 2007
Posted by Cal in : Articles, Humour , 6 commentsNo, this isn’t a review of a horror movie, although horror does play its part. Even if you’ve never seen a Hong Kong movie, you’ll probably find something familiar in the insanity that follows…
I was trawling through Play.com the other day when I noticed that a film called Fearless Hyena has recently been released by those nice folk at Hong Kong Legends. Hong Kong Legends (hereafter referred to as HKL) generally release the definitive versions of classic Hong Kong films (as the name implies, funnily enough) here in the UK. I tutted my annoyance as I’d only bought the HK version of this film only a few months ago. Then I thought, “hang on, I bought that on DVD before. And wasn’t this the film that…” and after a few minutes had this array on the floor by my PC:
Yes, I’ve got four different versions of this film. The first (on the left) was a VHS tape bought at an ex-rental shop for the princely sum of £5.00 back in 1993 (it was the only way you could get a copy then). The tape was quite worn and the transfer was pretty ropey, so after a year or two I took the unprecedented step of ordering a copy of the film from a mail-order firm in a magazine (this being long before the days of internet shopping and the global market). I sent off my cheque and waited the required 28 days for delivery. The result (see second from left) was a brand spanking new copy of Fearless Hyena. I was chuffed. However, upon watching said opus, I was rather disgruntled to discover that the film broke down about fifteen minutes from the end. There was then about five minutes of a blank screen and then the film came back, sort of showing a fast rewind until it got to the part where it left off. Not exactly conducive to a good viewing experience, this. Anyway, fast forward to the digital age (hurrah!) where I learn that Eastern Heroes have released the film. It’s still dubbed into English (booo!) but the box proclaims that it’s “Colour Enhanced & Digitally Re-Mastered for Higher Picture Resolution” (it isn’t) and a “16.9 Anamorphic version enhanced for widescreen television” (it isn’t that either – the top and bottom bits of the picture have simply been masked to give the impression of widescreen). Now I could probably go on for days about the frankly criminal shortcomings of Eastern Heroes, but as they have now gone the way of the dodo, there seems little point. Anyway, the box also proclaims “Interactive moving menus”, and this it has got, so we can all feel a little better about the situation. Needless to say, this particular version (see third from left) I never even bothered to watch. The fourth (right) is the Fortune Star version I bought last year. It’s in the original language (hurrah!), subtitled (double hurrah!) and genuinely remastered (gasp!). However, I noticed that the remastering process rendered some of the colours a little “artificial”, and of course the subtitles can’t match that of a western release. That HKL disc sure looks promising.
So there I am, my finger hovering over the “Add to Cart” button for the HKL DVD. And do you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking, “you know what? I’m not even sure I like the film anymore”…
So did I buy the film for the fifth time? No, not yet. But when the sale comes…
It’s one thing to deliberately double-up on certain titles when better versions come along (besides, I find a pile of old/unwanted DVDs makes a nice place to hide all your Hsu Qi “modelling” discs and suchlike) but over the past year or so I’ve been increasingly troubled by the possibility of buying the same film again by accident.
Now this will probably only resonate with other fans of Hong Kong films as all of their English language titles seem to come from a vocabulary of only about 150 words. When browsing through lists I look at something like Shaolin Drunken Vole Vs The Evil Dead and I have to think to myself “have I got that?” It might be me getting older or something, but I’m not retaining the information as well as I used to. Next item on the list, Naked Cop 3 or whatever, and I’m sure I’ve got that. I even remember bits of it in my mind. But lo and behold, it’s nowhere to be seen and I realise I’ve been thinking about something else entirely. Likewise My Flying Auntie and We Love Deadly Dancing Millionaires. So I opt for the DVD version of Legendary Weapons of China as I haven’t upgraded from VHS yet…and then look up to see it on the shelf next to me. So I decide to quit while I’m ahead and have a lie down for a bit.
I’ve so far only bought the same film by accident once: Sammo Hung’s Spooky Encounters. For some reason, I thought it was going to be the sequel (which I soon discovered was called, rather confusingly I feel, Spooky Encounters 2). But as time goes on and the old grey cells disappear, it’s inevitable that this kind of thing is going to happen again sometime.
When it does, I hope I can be philosophical about it and think of it as just another ringer to help hide my pile of eastern nudeyness.