Angel Terminators 2 (1993)

One of the fascinating things about words (aside from the power they can wield; I do believe they can be mightier than the proverbial sword) is their ability to be misunderstood.  I’m not simply referring to the varying extents of people’s vocabularies and the confusion that can cause.  I’m talking about the misinterpretation of words, and how people react to such misinterpretations.  For example (and I am completely stealing this from local radio personality John Webster, so if he happens to be reading this [which is doubtful], thanks and sorry), if you say, “throw the cow over the fence some hay before you leave,” the syntax is funny, first because of the mental image it immediately conjures (throwing a cow over a fence, at least momentarily), and second because we know these words don’t go in this order, and we love to laugh (however lightly or cruelly) at the mistakes of others.  

Another way misinterpretation can be a positive is in its ability to inspire.  A great many writers mis-hear phrases, and it stimulates something in their brains that ignites an idea for an essay or story (I’m thinking specifically here about Harlan Ellison as the first author from whom I heard this [as the impetus for his story Jeffty is Five], but I also think it’s one of those innate skills/quirks of scribes, seasoned and neophytic).  This leads into this week’s film, Tony Liu Jun-Guk and Chan Lau’s Angel Terminators 2 (aka Huo Zhong aka The Best of the Lady Kickboxer), which is one in an avalanche of Hong-Kong-produced films whose English subtitles are so literal they’ve become a trope in and of themselves.  You get such gems as, “You shall be responsible if I suffer loss today,” “You come only now?” and “Hey, you’re nut.”  This oddity doesn’t detract from the quality of the better-made Hong Kong films, but it does add a layer of fun to both accomplished and less polished efforts alike.  Thankfully, this film falls in the former category. 

After cops Great Aunt (Sibelle Hu, who wears sweat pants almost exclusively while on duty) and Bao (Jason Pai Piao) bust up a robbery, they head on over to the local prison.  Bao’s daughter Bullet (Yukari Oshima, who also wears some tragically baggy pants throughout the film) is being released, but she wants nothing to do with her old man.  Bullet’s best friend Chitty (Moon Lee, who we first see wearing a sweatsuit, notice a trend here?) and a gaggle of friends show up and take her into their care.  But vile gangster Mad (Anthony Cho Cheuk-Nin) entangles himself in all of their lives, and the only way out is through blood.

One of the things this “girls with guns” film has at its heart is a theme of bonds between people (like a great many Hong Kong movies).  Great Aunt and Bao are tight as partners.  She is the loose cannon, while he is usually the voice of reason (though he can certainly handle himself in a fight).  It’s a trait she admires in him, and she looks up to him both as an equal and (I got the impression) a surrogate daughter.  Likewise, Chitty and Bullet are best friends from way back, and they look out for each other to the extent that Bullet will defy people she probably shouldn’t (and this points to a key aspect of her character, as well).  Their friendship is primarily expressed physically in the fights in which the two girls seem to take great delight (with other people, not one another).  

But for how alike they are in that respect, Bullet and Chitty are different in how they relate to their actual families.  Bullet unrepentantly hates her father and displays her disdain openly (and considering her reason, you can’t really blame her).  Bao tries to reach out to his daughter, but his apparent lack of emotion, his detachment from what family means, and his belief in duty over all, only helps keep the two at odds.  Consequently, Bullet joined a gang in her youth and sought some form of acceptance in that lifestyle (this is never developed outside of a plot point, but it does make a certain sense for Oshima’s character).  Conversely, Chitty’s Uncle Tiger (the late, great Lo Lieh) is a retired gangster, and Chitty does her best to make him believe that she is straitlaced (she changes into demure eyeglasses directly before seeing him).  For how much she rebels, however, Chitty cares a great deal for Uncle Tiger.  She has what Bullet doesn’t have (more precisely, what Bullet rejects) – a family – and so, she is a kind of substitute family for Bullet.  As you may have guessed, these relationships become bonded by blood in a very actual sense, and it is in this way that the film resonates, as the best heroic bloodshed films (and action films in general) do.

These bonds and interrelationships carry over into ideas of individuality and conformity.  Chitty rebels in her friendship with Bullet and their skirmishes together, but she plays the part of a nice young woman for her uncle.  She wants to fit the mold she perceives as the norm, to please others over herself.  Bullet is fiercely independent, though she has to rely on her friends for support.  At one point, she tells Chitty, “If you don’t resist, others will beat you,” and this is the summation of her character from start to finish. This is not necessarily a philosophy she picked up in prison, although it would certainly aid in surviving on the inside.  It’s a wall she has built up over time to protect herself from harm: hurt others before they can hurt you.  By that same token, Bao is the model of conformity (and the film does make a point of emphasizing aspects of the British colonialism extant at the time of its production; so, there’s that).  While Great Aunt does act out in the same sort of way that Bullet does, she is able to be reined in to some extent by Bao and the powers that be.  Ultimately, it’s the two characters between the extremes (Chitty and Great Aunt) who will decide how they choose to live their lives for themselves and benefit from the lessons from both ends of this spectrum.

The fight choreography in Angel Terminators 2 is truly outstanding, and the participants (particularly the three main female characters) are a pure joy to watch (while I suspect there may have been some undercranking used to speed up the fights just a little, and if it wasn’t, color me even more impressed), and they are liberally sprinkled across the runtime.  The filmmakers, in the Hong Kong tradition, use stylistic flourishes to emphasize the kinetic characteristics of their action scenes with Dutch angles, quick tracking shots, slow motion, low angle shots, and wide angle lenses all thrown into the mix rather smoothly.  Also as is the norm in Hong Kong action films, the story brings up plot points that it forgets about and reintroduces them much later on, granting them more emotional weight than they probably should have for their lack of development.  Ergo, its pace moves in fits and starts in spite of the frequency and velocity of its action beats.  Despite its deceptive (some would say “sloppy,” and to be fair, I would probably prefer the term “ambitious”) structure, there is a ton to love about this film, and any fan of action films, foreign and domestic, should give it a whirl.  

MVT:  Yukari Oshima carries a lot of the film’s weight with a constant intensity that impressed me, her magnificent martial arts skills notwithstanding.

Make or Break:  Coming as no surprise to anyone, the Make for me is a scene towards the end involving Bullet, some Molotov cocktails, and a very large knife.  The first shot by itself was enough to engrain it in my head until the day I die.

Score:  7/10      

Black Magic 2 (1976)

Why have zombies become the go-to monsters in recent pop culture?  Because they’re easy to write?  Because they’re easy to cast?  Because they’re gruesome?  I could believe any of those.  But I think the reason zombies are so relatable to modern audiences is simplicity itself.  They are the ultimate ciphers.  You can read or overlay damn near any and all meanings, themes, etcetera on them that you could ever need.  This gives their stories multiple ways to be read, and makes them appealing to a wider audience than something like, say, werewolves or gill men.  Zombies can be as much about complacency as they can be about disease.  They can be about loss of self or the massing of the downtrodden against the Haves of the world.  They are capitalists and communists, eaters and eroded.  Honestly, their tales almost write themselves (simmer down, you zombie writers out there).  Even when they are used as henchmen in films such as Sugar Hill  or Ho Meng-Hua’s Black Magic 2 (Gou Hun Jiang Tou), they are still a little more than just meat.  They are slaves and vengeance-seekers, victims and henchmen.  Of course, none of this really forgives the tiresome overuse of these creatures of late, but sometimes understanding makes things hurt a little less.  Just a little, though.

Zhongping (Ti Lung) and Cuiling (Tien Ni) are doctors visiting their colleague and friend Zhenshing (Lin Wei-Tu) in Malaysia.  Zhenshing is having problems with maladies he believes are being cause by sorcery and has asked for his friends’ assistance.  Of course, the mainlanders think this is all malarkey, but they are willing to investigate.  Meanwhile, black magician Kang Cong (Lo Lieh) has taken a shine to Zhenshing’s wife Margaret (Lily Li) and quickly sets about putting her under his influence.  Can the yoke of black magic be broken?

Like its predecessor, this film is deeply concerned with perception and the act of looking.  Cong uses his zombies (actually corpses with stolen souls forced into them) to get money from men who are duped into having sex with the reanimated cadavers believing them to be the objects of their affection on who Cong was supposed to have cast a love spell.  Essentially, this turns Lieh’s character into a zombie pimp, and frankly, I would have been more than willing to watch a movie just following that storyline.  When Cong casts love spells on people for real, they can only see their intended lovers as attractive.  To accomplish this, we get a nice bit of visual flair around the edges of the frame, which is actually pretty funny in its Sherwood-Schwartz-ian level of gaudiness.  Everyone else is seen through a similar filter, but they all have boils and so forth on their faces, making them physically repellant.  Later, Zhongping is given something from the good sorcerer of the film which allows him to see the truth.  It is this power, located in his sight, which gives him the advantage he needs to take on Cong.  Cong gives people what they want by forcing others to see things he wants them to see.  When Zhongping is given the ability to “see with his own eyes,” he becomes powerful.  

This relates to another facet of the film; the struggle between magic and science, something I find fascinating.  Zhongping and Cuiling, naturally, are skeptical of their buddy’s claims about magic causing illness.  Still, when they see the patients and are allowed to study their afflictions (including the patented worms-crawling-under-the-skin bit), they are forced to change the focus of their views.  They were believers in the science they could quantify, and while they don’t become disbelievers of same, they have to expand their way of seeing the world.  Whether the irrationality presented in the magic they encounter could eventually be explained by science is debatable.  Like Arthur Clarke stated, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  Of course, he also stated in his Three Laws that, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”  Not to bastardize or try to twist Clarke’s statements to fit my little movie review too much, but this second declaration amply sums up the predicament of this film’s protagonists better than the first one, in my opinion.  

In a slightly indirect way, this also applies to the theme of the rural versus the urban in Black Magic 2.  Malaysia is considered less contemporary than Hong Kong.  Its people are more apt to believe in magic, therefore there are more magicians there, therefore there are more victims of black magic there.  Belief gives power to the supernatural, after all.  Even within Malaysia, however, there is a dichotomy between modernity and rurality.  Cong is a magician who has not only been featured in a book about sorcery (another funny piece of business in the film), but he dresses in a suit and tie when he’s not wearing his ceremonial robes.  His house is fashionable, replete with hidden panels to secret areas.  He hangs out in discotheques (assumedly to pick up johns for his zombie hookers).  Contrast this with the good magician, who wears a loose shirt and sarong.  His hair is poofed out like a wild man’s.  The first time we meet him, he is fishing for a crocodile that ate a village girl (the village is also very rustic, with huts dotted along the river banks).  Aided by his magic, he pulls the reptile in, guts it, and finds the girl’s necklace.  He hands this back to her friends and family.  He knows that bringing her back from the dead is a mistake, but he has given them justice and some form of closure in the form of the meager jewelry.  His character seeks balance in nature for the sake of all, not for personal gain and satisfaction like Cong.

Unlike the first film, this one fits a more traditional (even Western) mold in structure, characters, and approach.  It hews closer to White Zombie than it does to the original Black Magic, in my opinion.  Perhaps this is helped along by its better use of Lo Lieh and his natural magnetism.  His villain is straight forward in his intent, and there aren’t many tangents to kill the pace.  Where its predecessor showed restraint (more than it really should have) in its treatment of the subject matter, Black Magic 2 cuts loose with the crazy a bit more, and it keeps things lively throughout.  It also has a more visually striking aesthetic than the former picture, with a more thoughtful sense of composition and better use of the settings, both staged and natural.  It’s still not a must-see film in my view, but of the two Black Magic films in the Shaw Bros catalog, this is the winner for me.

MVT:  Lo Lieh steals every scene in which he’s featured.  The man has a penchant for cool menace, and even when he’s doing ridiculous things onscreen, you simply cannot take your eyes off of him.  There’s a reason the man is as beloved as he is, and it is readily apparent in this film.

Make Or Break:  The Make is the scene where Frankie Wei takes his inamorata to a hotel and makes love to her.  A clerk, thinking he’s going to catch an eyeful, spies on the two, and as the amulet Wei wears around his neck begins to negate the charm placed on the woman by Cong, we see that he is actually having sex with an animated corpse (portrayed by an elderly lady).  It’s creepy and sleazy and humorous, all at once.

Score:  6.5/10

Black Magic (1975)

I am thick as a brick.  Truly.  Not physically, mind you (that’s a little more gelatinous, I think).  But when it comes to relationships, subtlety just goes right out the window.  I don’t turn into the Wolf from Tex Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood or anything.  That’s not what I mean.  What I mean is I have no idea when a woman is actually interested in me (boo hoo).  Signs are not something I’m good at reading in this capacity.  For me to get the picture, I need to be all but bludgeoned over the head (and maybe even dragged back to a cave by my hair).  The more I think back on it, this density has caused me to miss out on several romantic opportunities.  I think it’s partly from trepidation over not wanting to misread a woman’s intent.  The other part comes from the nebulous nature of romantic signals to begin with (this may not apply to you, but we’re not talking about you, are we?) and my own internal, bastard logic which forces me to consider as many possibilities as I can without acting on any of them.  Maybe it’s a fear of commitment?  Conversely, this inability to make out the metaphorical Speed Limit signs on the road of love has allowed me to make a pure and utter ass of myself on more occasions than I’d like to admit where the objects of my affection didn’t reciprocate in the slightest (I’m sure more than a few of you will back me up on this one).  I suppose there’s some cold comfort in the thought that ignorance is bliss, though.  And if nothing else can be said about the characters in Ho Meng-Hua’s Black Magic (aka Jiang Tou), it’s that they are conceivably even less able to take a hint than I.

The film opens with a statement, part of which opines that, “according to Zuo Zhuan, excessive sex can have a similar effect as being under a spell.”  Okay.  Next thing we know, some lady is asking sorcerer Sha Jianmai (Ku Feng) to kill her philandering husband and his paramour.  Afterward, nice sorcerer Furong (Ku Wen-Chung) performs a ritual that destroys Sha’s hut and injures him badly (if temporarily, of course).  Some time later, Xu Nuo (Ti Lung) is sexually harassed at his construction job by Miss Yuo Lin (Tien Ni), though his heart belongs to fiancée Quming (Lily Li).  After Jiajie (Lo Lieh) uses Sha’s magic to bed Yuo Lin (are you getting all this?), she gets a crazy idea.  Go ahead.  Guess.

I can think of very few, if any, films with magic as a central element which aren’t about sex, death, or both, and Meng-Hua’s film is no different (we could even argue damn near every story ever written is the same in this regard, but we have limited space).  Jiajie wants to have sex with Yuo Lin, Lin wants to have sex with Xu, and Sha eventually wants to have sex with Lin, too.  Of course, when the sex component doesn’t work out as planned, the death component kicks in.  Either way, it appears as little more than just wanting to have sex with a person or have them killed.  But what it actually boils down to is control.  The sex and murder are nothing more than the ultimate statement of this desire for control over another person.  Yet, this control is incomplete, because what they get from their objects of desire has nothing to do with actual love.  Since the love spell cast on these people is only expressed through sex, their relationships are more akin to hooker and trick than to real lovers.  For the love they desire to mean anything, it must be given freely, of course.  Since it’s not, it’s not much more than being in love with a blow-up doll (or whatever your favorite marital aid is).  In other words, the love remains unrequited.  Only the physical end is satisfied, and even that’s debatable, depending on your opinion about whether sex is more a physical or mental/emotional act.

Reinforcing the idea of characters losing control of themselves and their lives are the film’s plentiful gross-out elements.  Coconut milk contains blood and tiny worms.  Worms infest a character’s body and have to be drawn out through a bamboo shoot.  Body parts are hacked up and allowed to decay, becoming maggot-riddled.  Grue-caked dead animals are hung outside houses.  These are corrupting elements, and they eliminate free will, because they are directly linked in with the characters’ blood.  In fact, Sha needs blood in order to perform his spells.  That their blood is stolen in the first place for this purpose is already a violation we don’t normally think of, since we rarely consider our blood unless we get cut open.  Yet, it is arguably the most intimate part of our bodies (along with semen; thus, death and sex), and it literally carries our life in itself, thus linking it into our innermost beings, our personalities, our souls, whatever you’d care to call them.  The decay, the worms, all of the elements of Sha’s black magic are indicators of corruption.  It’s not quite enough that a person’s mind is taken over.  No, they are corrupted at a core level, since they are unwilling in their actions (a case could likely be made for rape).  

Still and all, once their original personalities return, the characters are basically allowed to return to exactly the way things were before anything happened (or at the very least, we are left with this impression and no definitive proof to the contrary).  This, however, is more a choice of the filmmakers and something we more or less expect from Genre films from Hong Kong in this era.  They rarely, if ever, have a denouement of any type, the big climax being the final statement of so very many Shaw Bros films.  Though this is something I have grown to like about these movies, this particular film is actually kind of dull, all things considered.  There are exploitative elements aplenty, but the characters are all one-note in the extreme (a “B-Flat,” I think), the plot is a revolving door of people getting put under spells, doing their business, and coming out of their spells.  Possibly worst of all, the film looks flat.  The Malaysian settings are completely under-utilized and shot as if Meng-Hua were filming an Industrial short for Pan-Am.  The salacious aspects just didn’t make up for the drudgery of the majority of the film’s runtime.  It’s not bad enough to give it a thumbs down, though.  More like a thumbs sideways.

MVT:  The gross-out moments are the main attraction, and they do the job of being stomach-turning, because they use a lot of very real, wiggly worms, and this gives them a nice, visceral impact.  If only the rest of the film were as engaging on a gut level.

Make Or Break:  The scene where the worms have to be removed from a character’s back really hits the spot.  Without seeing it for yourself, there’s really not much else I can elaborate on, is there?

Score:  6/10