Pole Position

The second night of the Shaolin Film Archive's showing this week featured Dan Halsted showing a slide show documenting how he found four tons of kung fu in Vancouver. The story he tells has a lot of fun asides, but none is more entertaining than the customs trouble Halsted encountered when trying to bring his find into the United States. Customs officials got it into their heads that he was bringing pornography into the country based on the fact that one of the prints he found was for Dirty Ho. I know, right? It totally sounds like porn. It's not. It's a pretty awesome kung fu movie starring Gordon Liu and directed by Chia-liang Liu. I kind of wish Halsted had brought Dirty Ho with him, because it would be in my top five Chia-liang Liu movies along with Tiger on the Beat, Drunken Master II, My Young Auntie, and Mad Monkey Kung Fu. Instead, he brought Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1984), his own personal favorite. I can't really argue with the choice even if it's not in my own pantheon, because Eight Diagram Pole Fighter has everything you might want from a Chia-liang Liu movie: Gordon Liu, Kara Hui, a kick-ass cameo by the director (himself a revered martial artist), and final reel that is so brain-burstingly awesome that you walk away from the movie wondering if your eyes really saw what they just saw. And if, for myself, I find the story itself a bit of a jumble, I'm willing to admit that there are extenuating circumstances.

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