In short: The Avenger (1972)

aka The Queen Boxer

Shanghai in the early 20th Century (I think). The city's crime is ruled by a certain Mister Bai (Lee Ying) whose endless numbers of henchmen crush all opposition. Before the film's credits, Bai's people just barely manage to overwhelm Ma Yongzhen who attempts to kill Bai for some righteous reason or other.

Clearly, this sort of thing isn't without consequences, so it will come as no surprise to even the least experienced martial arts movie fan when Ma's sister Ma Su Chen (Chia Ling, whom I'm not going to call Judy Lee) arrives in Shanghai to avenge her brother. Ma Su Chen isn't Bai's only problem, though. A man named Fan Kao To (Peter Yang Kwan) has taken it on itself to make life difficult for Bai through acts of what is difficult not to describe as childish trolling.

While Fan Kao To is acting like a stupid kid, Bai erroneously - and for no reason the film ever bothers to explain - assumes his freshly arriving family to be the Ma family coming to town to take vengeance on him, resulting in a very dead Fan family, and another guy desperate on killing Bai.

Seeing as how their life goals align so beautifully now, Ma Su Chen and Fan Kao To are bound to stumble upon each other and maybe try to help each other out in the avenging biz.

Obviously, The Avenger is another very standard story of martial arts vengeance whose major discerning plot element is the rather dubious competence of everyone involved - the bad guys are too dumb to kill the right people and the good guys too emotional to ever make a sensible plan. The rest of the narrative consists of standard motions to get its characters in a position to fight, told in sometimes awkward ways but at least performed to some excellent needle-dropped music (hello, "Them from Shaft", old friend!).

Fortunately, once the film really gets going, these fights are a joyous and exciting thing to watch. It's not so much action director Mo Man-Hung's for the most part competent but not overwhelming choreography that is responsible for the effect of these all-important scenes but a combination of two things. Firstly, there's Chia Ling's highly enthusiastic performance of the genre-mandated glowering and ass-kicking with all the physical presence I want from my martial arts heroines. Secondly, (female) director Florence Yu Fung-Chi's ability to make even the least excitingly choreographed moments of the film dynamic through the power of creative direction and a sense for pacing that is so often missing in the cheaper martial arts films. Even though I've really seen it all before, and often better developed and surely better plotted, Yu's direction keeps everything moving and exciting.

The film's major highpoint is surely the grand finale where Chia Ling has to fight through a small army of henchmen armed with hatchets and lime inside the rather cramped interiors of Bai's home. Here, it's not only Yu's direction that's creative, but suddenly, Mo's choreography becomes daring too, as if the challenge of setting the final fight in cramped quarters and still making it exciting and dynamic hit a point of professional pride. The combination is riveting, making The Avenger's climax so exciting my complaints about the film's narrative flaws felt rather unimportant afterwards.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,martial arts,chia ling,peter yang kwan,lee ying

Three Films Make A Post: The girls do exactly what you think they do!

Female Chivalry (1975): This Taiwanese martial arts comedy directed by Yeung Jing-Chan is mostly playing the cheap variation of its genre by the book. It's still more entertaining than I'd have expected thanks to Chia Ling's (you may knows her as Judy Lee) performance: she kicks people around with great conviction, she smirks as if her character knew she were a nameless roguish heroine in a silly martial arts movie and approved of that particular lot in life, and she looks pretty smashing in men's clothing. That's more than enough to not only carry the film but drag it up a notch or three in quality and win my heart for ninety minutes.

Der Tod im Roten Jaguar (1968) aka Death in the Red Jaguar: There's a minor series of films based on German "Heftroman" (which are a little like post-war pulps, but different in ways generally making them inferior - I'll explain someday, if I ever find a more interesting film based on one) hero Jerry Cotten (in the movies played by the sleeping pill medicine knows as George Nader), working for an FBI that has as little to do with the original as the German Edgar Wallace movie adaptation Scotland Yard has with the real one. Cotten's adventures usually take place in a not-New York that's unreal in similar, yet less interesting, ways to the Wallace movies not-London; Der Tod mostly takes place in not-San Francisco.

Despite being directed by Harald Reinl who was generally pretty great at pulpy thrills, Der Tod contains a bit too much of the typical provincial stink of German genre film, and way too little that could lead to actual excitement. In fact, watching the film, one can't help but think the film is actively trying not to be too exciting, or weird, or funny, instead aiming for the boring middle ground for no discernible reason beyond the idea that a good German bourgeois is in love with the concept of the "middle ground".

Vessel (2012): This little SF/horror movie directed by Clark Baker, on the other hand, packs more excitement into its thirteen minute running time than can be found in a whole Cotten movie. Clearly, you can still use airplanes and tentacular aliens and a certain Twilight Zone episode for good.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: taiwanese movies,german movies,american movies,martial arts,crime,horror,sf,in short,yeung jing-chan,chia ling,harald reinl,george nader,clark baker

In short: The Lady Constables (1978)

The fiendish men of the Black Wind Fortress steal a set of pearls known as the Night-Shining Pearls, slaughtering the escorts protecting them in the process. Because the Pearls belong to Prince Cheng (whoever he is), the bandits' leader, either called Coldwater or Coldstar Tiger (depending on if you believe the subtitles or the HKMDB), in any case played by Chang Yi, disbands the group; the Pearls are divided between Tiger and his four sub-chiefs.

Some time later, three heroes begin stalking the former Black Wind Fortress members. There's the (lady) constable Tien Ying Hung (Angela Mao being Angela Mao, which is more than enough for me) who is the straightforwardly temperamental type. Tang Lin (Chia Ling), a lady who is looking for vengeance for the murdered escorts. She likes to play with coffins and home-made torture devices and is something of a charming psychopath. Prince Cheng's bodyguard Hung Yi (Wong Goon-Hung) has his orders and doesn't like to talk, so he's only communicating via little pre-written scrolls which just happen to always have the right content - or so I assume, for the (of course often terrible and unreadable) subtitles don't bother with his messages, so I found myself bound to think whatever he's saying with them must be as supremely sarcastic as his face is unmoving.

The three don't really team up, instead opting for trying to outwit and outrace each other to the black fortress people whenever possible. In the end, one of the three always ends up torturing one of the Black Wind Fortress chiefs while the others come in a minute later, only for all three to get distracted by something and their victim to end up dead by unknown hands (oh, whoever might it be?). Yes, our heroes are torturers and idiots.

Still, how difficult can it be to work through a bunch of bad guys and get some pearls back?

I don't really know why Cheung San-Yee's Taiwanese wuxia is called "The Lady Constables", seeing as it does only contain one actual lady constable, but I have to say the slight loopiness of that fact fits the slight loopiness of everything else about the film well enough. Now, The Lady Constables is not a true piece of weird fu - it's just not weird enough for that - and rather a relatively straightforward wuxia film that can't completely escape the natural tendency of a film of its genre and its era to always drift toward strangeness. So while there's nothing even close to a scene of a little person riding a giant and spraying acid from his goitre, the film still has its weird moments, like Chia Ling's coffin fixation, that whole "I'm not mute, but I still only communicate with tiny scrolls that even have their own sound effect" business, the metal armours that look like metal space suits the bodyguards of one of the chiefs wear (and which are of course beaten with a big magnet), the other bodyguards whose kung fu is based on standing in a leg-up, or Coldstar Tiger's umbrella of doom. It's not mind-blowing stuff if you're used to Taiwanese wuxia madness, but it's imaginative enough to help the characteristically basic plot stay interesting; a sense of whimsy goes a long way.

Cheung San-Yee's direction is nothing special either: he really likes to zoom in and out and in and out, keeps everything in focus and the characters in the shot, and that's about it as far as his direction goes. It's serviceable enough, which is exactly the thing I'd say about the fight choreography too.

There's nothing to make me go "oooh!" about The Lady Constables, yet also nothing that's disappointing or boring.

Technorati-Markierungen: taiwanese movies,in short,cheung san-yee,angela mao,chia ling,wong goon-hung,wuxia