A Heroic Fight (Taiwan, 1986)

Over my years of writing 4DK, I’ve developed an obsession with the Taiwanese actress Lam Siu Law, an extremely appealing performer who, for the better part of the 80s, played the adolescent male protagonists of a series of increasingly bizarre fantasy martial arts films. A Heroic Fight is not one of those, though it might be, despite its contemporary urban setting, even more bizarre than any of them.

The film begins with Thai crime boss Mr. Duh (Yuen Cheung Yan) arriving in Taipei for a meeting with Mr. Barner (Chin Ti), leader of the Golden Triangle gang. Barner wants Duh’s assistance in trafficking his drugs into Thailand, but Duh, having reformed, gives him a hard no. Enraged, Barner swears to avenge himself on Duh and his family. Going by the old “eye for an eye” rule, the commensurate revenge for being refused would be to refuse a request made by the person who refused you (say for a drink of water, or directions to the train station), but Barner is all about escalation. He will kidnap Duh’s little daughter Ting (who is not the same Ting seen in King of Snake, although that would be a fun bit of synergy.)

In a scene pretty typical of A Heroic Fight, the first attempt to kidnap Ting Ting happens while the child is happily karaoke-ing to Madonna’s "Material Girl" in a public park while wearing an age-inappropriate crop top. One of Barner’s men, disguised as a balloon vendor in a bootleg Mickey Mouse costume, hands her an enormous bouquet of helium-filled balloons and, of course, she immediately rises hundreds of feet in the air because helium was invented by NASA. Another henchman on the balcony of an adjacent hotel is able to snatch the tiny, distaff Icarus from the sky before the sun can ignite her and rushes her downstairs to a waiting van.

Fortunately for Ting Ting, young movie stuntman Lin Siu Long (Lam Siu Law) is nearby, miming a cover of Celine Dion’s “Power of Love” with his band. Hearing Ting Ting’s cries, he takes off after the van on his tricked-out bicycle, which, among other things, fires missiles and poisonous gas. The chase that follows is filled with crazy, dangerous looking stunts, as well as more than a few incidents of cleverly executed slapstick comedy, preparing us for the manic cacophony of tones that A Heroic Fight has in store for us.

Lest you assume that Long is a professional Celine Dion impersonator, we have already learned that he is part of a family of movie stuntmen who live in a gadget-filled house with their master/stunt director Master Lin (Yuen Cheung Yan.) The scene that introduces Long is one that easily could have been lifted directly from one of her earlier films, like Child of Peach or Kung Fu Wonder Child. It’s a movie-within-a-movie in which Long plays a young swordsman doing frantic, wire-assisted battle with a giant demon head that looks like it’s made out of yarn. A Heroic Fight’s film industry backdrop allows it to make some gentle fun of the Taiwanese commercial movies of its day and, in this case, the sometimes threadbare practical effects that they employed. A joking reference is even made at one point to Long always playing boys in her movies. She is also shown to have an appetite for peaches, in keeping with her career defining role in the Peach Boy movies.

And while the movie’s definitely a comedy--and often a funny one, even—I think it’s also fair to say that it was also intended by its director Chiu Chung-Hing, an action director who also worked with Lam Siu Law in Child of Peach and its nominal follow-up Magic of Spell, as a heartfelt tribute to the stuntmen of Taiwanese cinema. And it can’t be said that the stuntmen here don’t work hard to earn that honor; The film is nothing if not manically frenetic and loaded to bursting with cheekily over-the-top stunt sequences.

The movie is also as 80s as a spandex-clad Morgan Fairchild doing aerobics on top of a Delorean. From the numerous needle-dropped pop tunes ("Girls Just Want to Have Fun" among them) to little Ting Ting’s colorful dance/workout ensemble, to the BMX Bandits’ style dirt bike shenanigans, and pretty much everybody’s big ‘ol hair, this is a movie that is absolutely saturated with neon decade kitsch. Of course that will be a strike against it for some people, as will the fact that it’s a martial arts comedy, and I can’t really argue with that. Nonetheless, I think that to dismiss this movie too hastily would be a shame, because if you give yourself over to it (which I did), it’s a pretty fun ride. The in-jokey swipes at blockbusters both Hollywood and Mandarin give its humor a bit more of an air of self-referential sophistication than it might have if it simply relied on poop and piss jokes (though there are those, too.) and the action scenes are both directed and performed with a surplus of good-natured enthusiasm. It’s like a giddy celebration of everything that’s great about Chinese language action cinema.

Although it has to be said that it’s also fast paced to the point of being nearly incoherent. Once Long has rescued Ting Ting, he and his brothers become allies with Duh in his fight against Barner and his gang. This sets the stage for the films wild, all-fighting final third. Finally, Barner manages to take Ting Ting hostage, and the action takes on a more purposeful cast. Thankfully, as in her other films, Lam is never allowed to look totally convincing as a boy while she’s demonstrating her formidable fighting skills. One could hope that the makers of Lam’s films, in casting her as a boy, in no way meant to downplay the fact that she was both a woman and a kickass fighter.

To state the obvious, I liked A Heroic Fight a lot. I might even say that it is my favorite Lam Siu Law film that I’ve seen so far. This is not only because it provides a great showcase for the actress’ fighting skills, but also because it contains more madcap martial arts craziness than all of her other movies combined. That is not to say that I am suggesting someone try to combine all of Lam Siao Law movies, or to even watch them in one sitting. For that is surely the way to madness.

Podcast on Fire's Taiwan Noir Episode 27: Hello Dracula and The 36 Shaolin Beads

In the latest episode of Taiwan Noir, Kenny B. and I discuss Hello Dracula, Taiwan's casual, more friendly take on Mr. Dracula, and The 36 Shaolin Beads, a film I round in the dollar bin at Walgreen's and quite liked. Stream the episode now and be astounded by the rigor we bring to these arguably silly topics.

Fantasy Mission Force (Taiwan, 1983)

I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but I think that, when reviewing Fantasy Mission Force, the first thing that needs to be said is that it is clearly a comedy. I think most people would agree with this, though some (you know who you are) would prefer to ignore that fact and skip right to talking about how crazy, awful, or crazy and awful it is. That’s tantamount to showing a Chinese citizen Anchorman and telling them it’s a drama.

Which isn’t to say that Fantasy Mission Force isn’t crazy. It takes place in a world beyond the dimensions of time and space—and, if coherence is a dimension, that too. Sharing a director, Yen-Ping Chu, with Pink Force Commandos and the Shaolin Popey movies, it is a certified work of Weird Fu, though one with an unusual pedigree thanks to its absurdly top-loaded cast. This includes Jimmy Wang-yu, Brigitte Lin, Adam Cheng, Pearl Chang Ling and-- the primary reason that many people who might otherwise have ignored this film have seen it—Jackie Chan.

How Jackie Chan came to be in Fantasy Mission Force is the stuff of cult movie legend, and, like most cult movie legends, the likelihood that it is largely apocryphal is high. As the story goes, Chan starred in the film as a way of returning a favor to its producer and star, Wang Yu. Producer Lo Wei, angry that Chan had left his company for Golden Harvest, had allegedly ordered Triad thugs to put the hurt on Chan, who appealed to Wang Yu to use his alleged “connections” to circumvent that beating, which Wang Yu did, allegedly. You got all that? The thing is that, like all the best cult movie legends, it is entirely plausible. It is also an ironically grim backstory for a movie as unabashedly goofy as Fantasy Mission Force to have.

FMF reminds me a lot of Bollywood masala movies like Dharam Veer for how, in its eagerness to engorge itself with as many crowd-pleasing elements as possible, it completely ignores the intricacies of period. In Dharam Veer, that results in a world where gladiators, pirates, knights in shining armor, and gypsies all maintain an uneasy coexistence. In Fantasy Mission Force it results in a version of World War II in which the Nazis dress like extras from The Road Warrior and drive swastika-emblazoned muscle cars.

The movie takes place in a sort of Rorschach test version of war-torn Asia that could be literally anywhere and nowhere at once. As it starts, we see a quartet of military Generals--one French, one British, one African, and one American—-being taken captive by the Japanese. When the American is asked to identify himself, he sternly replies “General Abraham Lincoln!” If you are someone who needs your movies to make sense, this sequence will shout an immediate warning to you to either let go of that entirely or stop watching.

Yet you’re still watching, aren’t you? Such is the fatal allure of Fantasy Mission Force’s giddy stream of nonsense. And now you’re watching a scene in which the top brass of What-the-fukistan are looking at slides of Roger Moore’s James Bond, Snake Plisken from Escape From New York, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, and Brigitte Lin’s character from Golden Queen’s Commandos. None of these completely fictional beings, one of them announces, is available to head a rescue operation. This alerts us that the characters they do choose for the operation will be just as much fictional archetypes as those just mentioned, that the force is as much, or more of a fantasy than the mission. Thus FMF is, step by step, laying the groundwork for it to do whatever the fuck it wants narratively—all while worrying at old wounds by making the Japanese occupiers its villains and ensuring that it’s redemptive violence will provide easy catharsis for its audience.

Anyway, it is determined that the man for the job is Wang Yu’s Captain Wen, who is then shown careening around in a jeep, casually firing a machine gun one-handed as extras dutifully fall on all sides of him. Just like in The Dirty Dozen (and also The Wizard of Oz) Wen wastes no time in assembling a band of roguish ne’er-do-wells to join him. Sun (Sun Yueh) is a hobo and master thief. Greased Lightning (Frankie Koh) is an escape artist. Lily (Brigitte Lin) is a gunslinger with a score to settle against her caddish ex-beau Billy (David Thao), who is also along for the mission. Hui Bat-Liu and Fong Ching are members of the Scottish Guard and also (I think?) gay.

Finally, there is Sammy, played by Jackie Chan, an exhibition fighter from New York who bills himself as “The Chinatown Strongman”. Now, before you get excited about all the great martial arts sequences that are about to unfold, let me tell you that Chan is here mainly for comic relief purposes that make use of his gift for slapstick. In the English dub, his bumbling character is even given the whiny, simpering voice (“Master!”) that is usually reserved for Hui Bat-Liu. To complicate matters, Hui Bat-Liu is also given that voice, which suggests that the whiny, simpering voice actor really got a workout on this film.

Indeed, given the array of talent at it's disposal, FMF really doesn't provide us with much in the way of hand-to-hand combat, preferring to fall back on gunplay and explosions instead. Brigitte Lin alone is provided with any kind of showcase, while the awesome Pearl Chang, playing Chan's manager, is given none, and is relied on mainly for her irascible comedic persona. Even a confrontation between Chan and Wang Yu consists mostly of Wang Yu trying to crush Chan with an earthmover as Chan wheels around in a car. My friend and podcast co-host Kenny B suggested that this was perhaps because the producers weren't willing to fork out for the kind of insurance that would allow their stars to throw down in earnest.

Anyway, once the team is assembled, it’s time for a couple of completely random digressions. First, the gang finds themselves captured by a tribe of amazons who are, by all appearances, ruled over by a tuxedo-clad Adam Cheng. Though this might seem like a detail worth examining, it is completely dropped once the Force frees themselves from the amazons and blow up their island as a way of saying goodbye. Next they spend the night in a haunted house filled with hopping vampires and mah-jongg playing ghosts.

If you have by now concluded that Fantasy Mission Force is essentially the honey badger of movies, you are absolutely right. And for all those who revel in the many fucks it does not give about being a conventional movie, there are an equal number of people who are enraged by it, insulted, even—thus its online reputation for being the Worst Jackie Chan Movie EVER.

Personally, I think that comprehension-defying films like Fantasy Mission Force provide a crucial service to serial movie consumers like me, in that they challenge our expectations, expand our idea of what a movie can be and, most importantly, open our minds. Of course, for that to happen, one must respond to the first of its many demands on our suspension of disbelief with a hearty “fuck yes!"

Nine Demons (Taiwan/Hong Kong, 1984)

What better to review during a period of concern over masculine toxicity than a film by Chang Cheh, Hong Kong cinema’s chief promoter of male dominance? Of course, Cheh, during his life, objected to critics’ focus on the suffocatingly macho nature of his movies, and most vociferously to any suggestion of homoeroticism. But other evidence suggests that the director saw his restoration of the male hero to martial arts cinema—after the extended reign of the chivalrous swordswoman, personified by Connie Chan, Suet Nei and Josephine Shao, in the nation’s Cantonese cinema—as a holy crusade. Why else would his signature work, The One Armed Swordman, begin with a symbolic castration of its hero by a female opponent, followed by that hero’s arduous struggle to once again assume his place of mastery in the Martial World. I suspect that, to Chang, this was his own struggle cast in mythic terms—his epic, hardwon battle to turn kung fu cinema into a He-Men-Woman-Haters Club, slamming the treehouse door shut once and for all on any of those icky girls who might want to join the game. Bitches.

Fortunately for Chang, among his many filmic celebrations of chiseled male physiques both ripped and torn, are a bunch of films that are just plain goofy. These include his Journey to the West riff, Fantastic Magic Baby, his appropriately titled final film for Shaw Brothers, The Weird Man, and the film we are discussing today, Nine Demons. It’s fortunate for him, mainly, because I would otherwise never get around to writing about his movies, which, 4DK being the bastion of unbridled masculinity that it is, would surely cause him to spin in his grave.

Nine Demons (aka Nine Child Sky Demon), to the extent that it is known at all in the West, is notorious among fans of offbeat cinema for an odd quirk in its English dub. By this I mean that it’s two main characters, Zuo Qi, played by Ricky Cheng Tien-Chi, and Gan Yun, Played by Lu Feng, are known as “Joey” and “Gary”, respectively. Just as oddly, all of the other characters in the movie retain the Chinese names given them in the original. Yet those two names, spoken so often throughout the film, nonetheless succeed in injecting an element of stoner comedy into what is otherwise a fevered martial arts/horror hybrid in the style of Boxer’s Omen—as if Bill and Ted had somehow piloted their time machine back to 16th century China.

Zuo Xi and Gan Yun (yes, I was tempted to refer to them as Joey and Gary, but my dogooder impulses impel me to correct the insult done this picture by it’s foreign dub) are the sons, respectively, of Master Gan (Chang Peng), the patriarch of the powerful Gan Manor, and his loyal associate, Supervisor Zuo (Wong Tak-Sang). When forces lead by Gan’s treacherous servant Yin stage a takover of the Manor, killing their fathers and capturing Yun, Zuo Qi escapes, only to stumble into a hole that leads to the underworld. From other films of this type (Pearl Chang Ling’s Matching Escort, for instance) I’ve gathered that China was littered with such holes at this time, a pressing infrastructure issue that appears, by our time, to either have been resolved or become a very well kept secret.

Anyway, once in the underworld, Joey—I mean Qi—appeals to its ruler, the Demon Lord (Chris Lee Kin-Sang), to help him save his friend Gar—um, Yun. In reply, the Demon Lord tells him that, since getting his ass handed to him in an obviously ill-advised fight with God, he has been confined to the Demon Palace (which is, presumably, where we are now; there must have been some kind of copyright issue with just calling the place "Hell".) Instead he tells Qi that, if he would be willing to let himself become possessed by nine demons, he would attain magical powers that will help him in his fight against the usurpers of Gan Manor. There are down sides to this plan, naturally, and they are two in number: One is that the demons must regularly feast on human blood to retain their power; the other is that Qi himself will eventually become a demon. Needless to say, Qi agrees.

The demons, who are confined to a cage, are a noisome lot comprised of eight hyperactive little boys in grass skirts who caper around, doing backflips and sommersaults while cackling and jibbering like spider monkeys on crack. The group is rounded out by a sexy vampire lady played by Wong Gwan. These nine move about by turning themselves into flying skulls that hungrily bury their chompers into their victims. After the manifestly agonizing process of having the nine demons introduced into his body, Qi carries their skulls around with him in the form of a necklace, and uses a magical remote control called the Command Placard to deploy the demons at will.

Now, if the above sounds like a superhero origin story, it largely is—a fact driven home by the purple cape and colorful skintight outfit Qi is suddenly wearing once he’s become possessed. It also, in combination with Ricki Cheng’s feminine features and heavy eyeliner, drives home just how gay Chang Cheh’s movies can be. Though it needs to be said that Cheh might also  be adopting glam rock's playful approach to gender, as Qi looks like he's one Flying V guitar away from being one of the Spiders From Mars.

Gender identity aside, Qi swoops in to save Yun in true superheroic fashion and then join him, also superheroically, in defeating the usurpers of his throne. Yun’s rule is short-lived, though, as Yi soon dispatches another team of invaders, lead by the malevolent Fu (fight choreographer Sheng Chiang) and his two brothers, who kill Yun in the course of reclaiming the Manor. Qi again escapes and takes to wandering the countryside, seeking vengeance while at the same trying to keep his demons from munching too profligately on the populace. He fails in this last task so spectacularly that the frightened townsfolk end up giving him the name “Little Monster”.

In case you were wondering, Cheh does, in addition to the vampire lady, introduce one more female character into Nine Demon’s overwhelmingly male landscape, and she’s a whore. Mind you, this character, Miss Miao, is a virtuous whore, having been kidnapped and forced into the sex trade at a young age. As Qi's love interest, she also fulfills the role so often relegated to women in Cheh’s movies: that of the buzzkill. Like Wang Yu’s wife in One Armed Swordsman, Miao tries to urge our hero toward the peaceful life, thus potentially depriving us of the gore drenched pummel fest that both we, the audience, and the villains so richly deserve.

As we would expect from Cheh, Nine Demons is stuffed to bursting with well-choreographed fight scenes. The crowning set piece is an all-comers brawl that takes place upon a lattice of bamboo poles suspended over a swamp, where Qi first battles Yin's remaining forces and then the demons themselves in a fight to save his soul. As such, it’s a pretty entertaining film and, when we’re being treated to the psychedelic spectacle of cackling, glitter-flecked skulls flying into the camera, even approaches being fun. Unfortunately it’s weighted down by Cheh’s workmanlike (i.e. always competent, but seldom imaginative) shooting style and the fact that his actors are as expressive as sentient sides of beef. All in all, it’s a film much like a college guy’s apartment: utilitarian, homely, and—despite the odd, colorful flourish—crying out for a woman’s touch.

Shaolin Invincibles (Taiwan, 1978)

I’m sure this kind of thing happened all the time in the Taiwanese film industry of the 70s: A director would be putting the finishing touches on his perfectly respectable little martial arts film, and then someone with his hand on the purse strings would say something like, “You know, I’ve always wanted to see Judy Lee fight a gorilla.”

That is, at least, what I have to assume happened in the case of Shaolin Invincibles, a film now widely known as “the one with the gorillas.” The thing about Shaolin Invincibles, though, is that it—unlike other Taiwanese martial arts film, which included all kinds of outlandish elements to distract from their technical and narrative shortcomings—is a very well-crafted and wildly entertaining movie, replete with charismatic performances, energetic pacing, and a boatload of exciting fight sequences. Yet there are the gorillas.

For the scholars among you, the film is set during the Ching Dynasty, though all that matters for the rest of us is that it is a time when a fearsome despot has cast his shadow over the land. As we join the action, that despot, King Yeung Chang (Cheng Hung Lee) is having the entire family of a low level functionary slaughtered over an imagined slight. Fortunately, a heroic monk intervenes just in time to save the two youngest children of the family, the sisters Lu Sziu and Lu Yu. The girls are taken back to the monastery and rigorously trained in the art of Shaolin kung-fu for twelve years, after which they flower into adult womanhood in the form of actresses Chia Ling and Lung Chun-ehr.

Chia Ling is today probably best known by the name under which she was introduced to Western audiences, Judy Lee. This was one of many attempts by producers at the time to increase a kung fu performer’s box office clout by intimating some kind of vague familial connection between them and Bruce Lee (Lee being such an unusual name for a person of Chinese descent that it would be impossible to conclude otherwise.) In Chia Ling’s case, this appears to have been effective, as it is reported that quite a controversy arose once her relation to Lee was proved bogus. Anyway, what matters most is that, by any name, Chia Ling is a massively underrated performer, gifted both as an actor and a martial artist, who deserves to be considered alongside Angela Mao as one of the most iconic female stars of the Martial Arts genre. (Which is not to say that her co-star, the beautiful Lung Chun-ehr—also known as Doris Lung—was any slouch either.)

Anyway, after turning Lu Sziu and Lu Yu into unstoppable killing machines, the monks see fit to release them into the populace. The two girls split up, pledging to later rendezvous in the capital city, where they will enact their plan of vengeance against the King. Lu Sziu (Lee) then makes haste to her old village, where she makes short work of murdering a magistrate who was complicit in her family’s deaths. This act serves to announce Lu Sziu’s presence to all interested parties, including the King’s crony Governor Lei (Yee Yuen.) Lei has assured the king that all of Lu Sziu’s family has been killed, and so is anxious to have the living refutation of that claim that Sziu represents eliminated post haste. He orders that his “best men” be put to the task.

Now this reference to “best men” might not prepare you for what we see next—which is the king being introduced to a pair of kung fu trained gorillas by a pair of freaky wizards with long, tape measure-like tongues. Now I’m not saying that the idea of gorillas as kung fu assassins is necessarily stupid; I suppose that the right director might be able to pull it off, given his gorilla costumes were convincing enough. Unfortunately, it is the appearance of the gorillas in Shaolin Invincibles that render them so egregious. Keep in mind that otherwise this is a very nice film to look at, with colorful, eye catching costumes, spectacular historical locations, and attractive stars, all filmed to lovely effect by an uncredited cinematographer. The gorilla costumes, in contrast, look like old shop stock at a costume rental store; moth-eaten and ill fitting, flopping and sagging pathetically around the bodies of the actors who’s sneakers can be seen poking out from the the legs. Oh, and lets not forget to mention the clearly visible zippers.

None of this is helped by the fact that these gorillas are hyped as the ultimate weapon, not just of the king and his cronies, but of Shaolin Invincibles itself. Thus is the eventual confrontation between them and the Lu sisters endlessly hyped and foreshadowed throughout the film. Thankfully, this leaves time in the interim for a number of well-staged fights with other opponents of a less inherently silly nature—which is saying a lot given that, among those opponents, are the guys with super long tongues and another with a bulging eye that I kept expecting to pop out every time he was punched.

That said, I have to admit that the fight with the gorillas, when it comes, is actually pretty exciting. This is testament to the abilities of director Hou Cheng, who clearly knows his way around a brawl. This is a film with an impressive number of fights, and each boasts credibly bone-crunching choreography, minimal (or, at least, well concealed) wire-work, and kinetic action marked by lots of aerial flips and somersaults, all of which is filmed and edited for maximum legibility and impact.

It is after this fashion that Lu Sziu wallops her way across the countryside, leaving a trail of clobbered minions in her wake. And when she is eventually joined by two fighters—played by Carter Wong and Dorian Tan--whom the monks have assigned to watch over her, the body count increases exponentially. Once she and her sister are reunited, the two women, under false identities, take jobs as housekeepers at the King’s trap-laden castle, hoping by that means to clear the way for an eventual siege.

As someone who likes nothing more in an old martial arts film than a trap-laden lair, I have to say I was disappointed by how few of these alleged gizmos we got to see put into action. The only exception, really, is a trap door that delivers Lu Sziu into a spike-laden underground dungeon. This she escapes, in a sequence reminiscent of The Count of Monte Christo, with the help of a prisoner in a neighboring cell, who turns out to be the castle’s ill-fated architect. Armed with a map he has given her, she and her fellow fighters head into Shaolin Invincibles’ conclusion, which is just as spectacular a mosaic of parallel action as the film has been priming us for all along, with each of the stars’ considerable fighting skills being showcased to dazzling effect.

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, it is likely that Shaolin Invincibles' reputation has preceded this review by a considerable measure of time. In that case, you will probably be surprised to learn that I give the film my unqualified recommendation—and not as some kind of "WTF" kung-fu oddity, but as a thrilling and well-made example of its genre. It may lack the lofty pretensions of a King Hu film, but, as a nuts-and-bolts martial arts action film, it delivers everything you might want in high style. Thus its shitty looking gorillas are, to my mind, not a fatal flaw, but something for which it has earned a well deserved dispensation.