Heroes of the East (1978)

aka Shaolin Challenges Ninja

aka Shaolin vs. Ninja

aka Drunk Shaolin Challenges Ninja

Original title: 中華丈夫

Hongkong businessman’s son Ho To (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) has come of age. This means he is bound to marry the daughter of a long-time Japanese business partner of his father, in a marriage arranged when the victims were still kids. Ho To’s not best pleased. However, things turn less gloomy for the groom when said daughter, Yumiko (Yuka Mizuno), turns out to be rather on the attractive side. Even better, the young couple do hit it off rather nicely, and things seem set for a great marriage with attractive, bilingual kids.

Alas, both of the newlyweds turn out to be rather fanatical martial artists. Instead of bonding over this shared interest, they focus on cultural differences and short tempers. Ho To thinks Japanese martial arts rather unladylike, while Yumiko clearly finds her husband’s kung fu a bit girlie. Quite a bit of physical fighting between the irascible couple ensues, until Ho To manages to insult Yumiko and the whole of Japanese martial arts, and she flees back to Japan in anger.

Following the advice of his dumbest servant, Ho To then decides to lure his wife back to Hongkong by writing her a challenge letter in which he further insults Japanese martial arts. Thanks to a former admirer of Yumiko, who is also her ninjutsu teacher, that letter lands in the hands of the grandmaster of a school for all kinds of Japanese martial arts, who, keeping with the short tempers of everyone in the movie, does not like what he reads there. Thus instead of a penitent or even more angry wife, a whole horde of masters of various martial arts arrive from Japan on his doorstep, and Ho To will have to beat every single one of them without causing the martial arts version of an international incident. On the plus side, Yumiko returns without wanting to fight.

There is really very little about Lau Kar-Leung’s Heroes of the East that isn’t awesome in one way or the other. Really, the only thing I don’t like about this tale of marriage troubles caused by some of the hardest heads in romance/martial arts is that the set-up leaves no room for the Japanese martial artists to win a bout or two against Ho To. But then, unlike most Hongkong movies, Heroes of the East does not portray the Japanese as bucktoothed villains, instead giving them and their particular martial arts cultures respect, and the fighters personalities – of course mostly expressed via fighting styles. Even better, the Japanese characters are actually portrayed by Japanese martial artist actors, so the Chinese vs Japanese martial arts are a bit more than Hongkong actors imitating Japanese fighting.

Instead, Lau’s fight choreography finds particular joy in the match-ups of the most artistic versions of culturally differently coded fighting styles, putting such an impressive amount of thought and intelligence into making every single fight different and inspired, one will hardly even notice that what starts as a martial arts romantic comedy turns into a series of fight set pieces.

But then, as is only proper and correct for martial arts cinema, there’s actually quite a lot expressed through the fighting. One of the movie’s subtler points is how much Ho To grows by having to level up his kung fu against so many accomplished fighters, acquiring a poise, dignity and politeness that is directly expressed through the changes in his fighting style. With these traits he could of course have avoided the whole marital malaise completely if he’d only already had them when squabbling with his wife.

Even though the film unfortunately spends very little time on her in the later proceedings, it is clear that Yumiko goes through a comparable process of personal growth, less by having to fight it out, but by watching her friends and her husband putting themselves through an ordeal for little more than angry words.

Dirty Ho (1979)

Original title: 爛頭何

“Dirty” Ho Ching (Wong Yu) is a pretty enthusiastic thief with a certain penchant for self-taught kung fu. He’s just managed a great jewel heist and is in the process of spending some of his ill-gotten gains on some high class courtesans (one of whom is played by house favourite Kara Hui Ying-Hung) in a brothel situated on a river boat when a man in a neighbouring pavilion we’ll soon enough learn is named Wang Chin Chen (played by yet another house favourite, Gordon Liu Chia-Hui), is starting to get in a not terribly subtle bidding contest for the ladies’ interests. The size of jewel chests is compared and Ho’s found wanting, until the latter clearly wants to start a more physical kind of fight. The brothel owner calls the police who arrests Ho. However, Wang secretly shows the police a seal that identifies him as part of the Imperial Court, and orders them to let Ho go as soon as possible, while he himself takes care of the thief’s jewels.

Obviously, once released, Ho wants to get back at Wang, but loses a fight against Crimson, whom Wang declares to be his new bodyguard. Well actually, Ho loses against Wang who puppets Crimson while pretending to hide behind her back, but Ho not being terribly bright he’s not going to notice subtleties like this.

Ho does go on to further attempts at getting back at Wang, but the latter needs little effort to have things go his way. Eventually, Ho finds himself poisoned and blackmailed into the role of Wang’s martial arts student.

Unlike Ho, the audience at this point knows what’s going on: Wang is the eleventh son of the Emperor, spending his time on art, fine wine, women and martial arts training while roaming the country, and shows little interest in becoming the next Emperor. However, one of his brothers believes exactly this will undoubtedly make Wang the Emperor’s candidate of choice, and has set in motion various plans to kill this most unwilling of rivals.

Which leads to a couple of incredible scenes during which Wang is invited to sessions with other friends of the arts who try to murder him while both sides pretend to only be interested in wine or paintings. Ho, as usually not getting it, blithely pokes around the edges of these scenes.

Eventually, Wang is hurt badly enough in one of those fights that he needs to intensify Ho’s training as his body guard.

Dirty Ho is a particularly fun example of director and martial arts director Lau Kar-Leung’s ability to make deeply physical kung fu comedies that still don’t have as much of an affinity to slapstick as the Golden Harvest model (which I have grown to love over the years) shows. Instead, his Shaw Brothers comedies have a certain restraint in their physical comedy that can express uproarious humour through the incredible precision of Lau’s brilliant choreography given life through a fine cast of martial artists and actors, but that feels more like Fred Astaire than Buster Keaton (who I both love, as regular readers will know).

There’s a great sense of invention in the film’s fights, even when Lau uses ideas you will also have seen in earlier films of the genre (and that will be repeated ad nauseam in the future). There’s just such a perfection of comical timing and elegance in something like the the puppetting sequence with Liu and Hui, it can leave this viewer quite breathless. Not only from laughter but also in admiration for the intelligence of choreography, visual staging and performance on display. Liu never repeats a trick in the movie, and so every fight scene is of equal brilliance but also absolutely distinctive from the next.

The wine and arts assassin sequences are particularly fine as well, with the mix of physical violence and verbal politeness making for some poignant bits of humour.

This being a Hongkong comedy, there are also moments of outrageous weirdness – some of which might be seen as problematic for some contemporary tastes – as well as a transition to some more serious – and still incredible – fights in the climax, all of which Lau and his cast and crew handle with the same aplomb, elegance and off-handed visual class.

In short: Kill 'Em All (2012)

Again, a maniac kidnaps a bunch of people, stuffs them into a decrepit warehouse, and plays games with them. Only this time around, the kidnapper will later turn out to be played by Gordon Liu Chia-Hui, his victims are all successful professional killers with martial arts skills (with Ammara Siripong, Johnny Messner and Tim Man as the central characters), and the only game Gordon likes - apart from gloating - is seeing them fight one-on-one to the death, promising survival to the last one standing.

Some of our killers (maybe the ones whose actors I named!?) are not quite as gullible as poor Gordon Liu may hope, though, and may find the brains to team up and take the fight into more warehouse rooms, and to their captor and his army of stunt people playing crazy dress-up.

If you've got to make a warehouse-bound martial arts/action movie, you can do much worse than decide what Kill 'Em All's Raimund Huber did and take your most basic set-up (sort of) from Saw but replace all semi-sadistic games and stupid plot twists with martial arts fights. Thusly, Kill 'Em All may not exactly win any prizes for originality, but it sure is a film trying to make the most of its miniscule budget and to deliver what its potential audience will probably really come to see - a lot of fights.

While there's nothing spectacular about Tim Man's choreography or Huber's way of shooting it, it's solid and dependable with some bursts of actual energy and - particular in the final fights - a nicely presented sense of brutality that befits a film whose heroes are professional killers. I'm also quite happy to report that Huber shoots the fights straight, with editing rhythms and camera angles meant to show off the actors' (all of whom have more martial arts and/or stunt experience than acting experience) skills, which seems to be a style that slowly replaces the micro-editing and camera-shaking that has marred low budget action movies in the last fifteen years or so again. Generally, martial arts is something I actually like to see in a martial arts movie, so I'm all for it.

There is little else to say about Kill 'Em All. Its level of writing and acting are about where you expect them to be in this kind of production - good enough for what the film is, probably horrifying if you're the sort of person who goes into a film called Kill 'Em All expecting much depth in these regards. The rest is silly bad guy talk, one rather funny joke about ninjas, and a lot of fun scenes of people beating each other up. I call that a highly satisfying evening's entertainment.

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