Instead of continuing to add to the “What have you watched lately?” thread with new Shaw Bros. reports, I thought it better to create a new thread and keep them all in one place for those interested, especially since I've been doing so many of them--and the films are often related to each other, theme- or personnel-wise.

Two more Shaw Bros. DVDs:

THE ASSASSIN (1967) –What a difference a restored/letter-boxed DVD makes. This is easily one of the best transfers I’ve yet seen from Celestial. It’s just a beautiful-looking production. This may well be Chang Cheh’s most artfully directed movie. He’s much less interested in action here than in formal qualities—the cinematography, set design, costumes, movements of the characters and their placement in the frame, etc.--something I never quite associated with Chang. And these qualities extend to the characterizations. Chang wrote the script (based on characters from the ancient historical text, “Records of a Great Historian”) and it’s filled with moving dialogue exchanges as characters set forth their positions and the main character, Nie Zheng (Jimmy Wang Yu) weighs all his obligations—moral, filial and personal—before deciding carefully on a course of action. The action scenes take a back seat to the interplay of the characters, making this film play like a Chinese version of some of the classic samurai films of the mid-1960s (think SAMURAI ASSASSIN and SAMURAI REBELLION).

There are three strong women characters here (his hometown sweetheart, his sister and his mother)—again, something we don’t normally associate with Chang--and Wang Yu has emotional, tender scenes with each of them. A fourth woman character, Concubine Zhao, has a much smaller part, but she’s no less affecting.

The aformentioned historical text also formed the basis for Zhang Yimou’s HERO, Chen Kaige’s THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN and, possibly, John Woo’s LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY. I saw some parallels with HERO, but I’ll leave it to someone more familiar with that text to spell out what these films have in common, if anything. In any event, seeing THE ASSASSIN finally in a proper version compels me to add it to my list of top ten Shaw Bros. movies.

THE DELIGHTFUL FOREST (1972), also directed by Chang Cheh. This one follows the character of Wu Sung, the famed “tiger killer” from “The Water Margin,” during episodes preceding his alliance with the band of 108 outlaws who raid a town to rescue imprisoned members in the 1972 film, THE WATER MARGIN and reunite for its sequel, ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS. TIGER KILLER (1982) is a ten-years-later prequel to DELIGHTFUL FOREST and depicts the events leading right up to what happens in the earlier film. Ti Lung plays the character in all four films. DELIGHTFUL FOREST is quite an enjoyable film with some brutal kung fu action as the super-strong Wu Sung drinks a lot of wine, kicks a lot of ass and gets a lot of revenge. It’s not quite as important a film as THE WATER MARGIN or its sequel, since it feels more like a middle chapter than a complete film. It’s probably best to see these films again in their proper narrative order. Which I’ll do someday…

I’d only previously seen this film in a poor-quality English dub missing some 17 min. of footage, including huge chunks of the action finale. The patchy music score in the dub and its awful electric guitar riffs are not on the original Mandarin-language version, the music track of which consists almost entirely of cues lifted from Ennio Morricone’s scores for the Sergio Leone films, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and DUCK, YOU SUCKER, some of them re-orchestrated.

Great.

Looking forward to reading about how complete the new SEEDING OF A GHOST disc is. I'm dying to retire my nth generation VHS dub.

Victor

THE MIGHTY ONE (1972) – This one stars Ivy Ling Po, the only major Shaw Bros. star in the cast. It was directed, surprisingly, by Joseph Kuo, who later gained fame for numerous 1970s kung fu classics made in Taiwan, including MYSTERY OF CHESS BOXING, 7 GRANDMASTERS, BORN INVINCIBLE and the 18 BRONZEMEN series. I’m assuming this one was made in Taiwan because the sets and locations sure look different from the usual SB swordplay production of the time and because none of the SB regulars are in the cast. The actor who plays the villain, a red-faced, white-haired evil kung fu master in a black-and-red outfit, is Lu Ping, someone I never heard of before who is i.d.’d in the Special Features bio as having been a top star for decades in Taiwan (he was about 40 in this one). IMDB doesn’t list many credits for him, though. He has the biggest part in the film.

Ivy pops in and out of the action as does her co-star/fighting partner, Ling Yun, who was in a good number of Shaw Bros. movies but mostly made his mark elsewhere. They play older versions of characters seen as children in an eight-minute opening sequence. No one else seems to age in the film. Ivy is first seen at the 32-minute mark. There’s one actor among the villains, Lung Fei, who turns up in dozens of late 1970s/early ‘80s kung fu films. IMDB also lists Blacky Ko as a cast member, although if he was in the film I didn’t recognize him.

There are a lot of fight scenes, most of them quite gimmicky. Lots of exotic weapons, high leaps over opponents and, in an original touch, a bit of telekinetic kung fu. Not a lot of actual martial arts expertise on display. Ivy wasn’t exactly the greatest fighter among Shaw Bros. female stars and I wish they’d cast Cheng Pei Pei or Shih Szu instead. I think it would have made for a better film that way. For a star of Ivy’s stature, this film was something of a comedown--although she did make the spectacular 14 AMAZONS the same year.

Interestingly, this film looks forward to Kuo’s later films, particularly in the basic plot structure (someone on a mission goes around the country terrorizing renowned kung fu teachers) and in the final fight in which the two heroes combine their best efforts to take on an all-powerful villain in a brutal extended fight scene filmed on location.

Entertaining and a little different in tone and style for a Shaw production of 1972, but ultimately too lightweight to be of note. I wonder if this was made by a different company and picked up for release by Shaw.

LADY OF STEEL (1969) is another run-of-the-mill Cheng Pei Pei swordplay adventure about an ongoing battle between one good swordfighting group and one bad one, with Cheng as a young swordswoman seeking to avenge the death of her parents. However, it has some key elements to recommend it. For one thing, it’s got the Beggars Clan in it, an organized group of clever, fighting beggars who appeared in the Brave Archer films. I enjoy them whenever they appear and I wish I could remember what else I’ve seen them in. (A search for “Beggars Clan” in my Word files on past Shaw Bros./kung fu viewing did not yield any results beyond BRAVE ARCHER & co., yet I'm sure I've seen them in some non-Shaw kung fu films.) Here, the beggars are led by a way-too-cleancut Yueh Hua, who pops up to help our heroine in moments of need.

Also, Cheng Pei Pei has some good scenes where she’s in disguise. In one, she’s posing as a roadside singer who does a song and strums a stringed instrument and then asks for coins among patrons of a roadside eating place. She does these graceful, deferential, flirtatious moves to draw away one of the customers, a guy with a letter for the lead villain. She lures him into the forest and…(let's just say the guy doesn't get lucky)...in the next scene she poses as the guy and shows up at the villains’ fort to deliver the letter. Later, after being recognized as an imposter, she escapes and looks for Yueh Hua for help. She dresses up as an old beggar woman and eats a lot of food at a restaurant and then declares she can’t pay for it. As the restaurant staff beats her up, the nearby beggars come to her aid and soon Yueh Hua shows up, which was the desired result of her ruse.

I’m reminded by this film of how little opportunity Cheng Pei Pei got at Shaw Bros. to play the wider range of roles/psychological depth she was capable of. She’s very good in the 1967 musical, BLUE SKIES, as a more complex character than her swordplay figures, and is given multiple emotional layers to play. She’s also great in DRAGON SWAMP (1969), another swordplay film (one of her best) and one in which she plays a dual role as mother and daughter.

So, LADY OF STEEL is not the greatest Cheng Pei Pei film I’ve seen, but it's fast, short (84 min.) and consistently entertaining. Directed by Ho Meng-hua, who also directed the Monkey King films (THE MONKEY GOES WEST, PRINCESS IRON FAN, et al) and two other Cheng Pei Pei vehicles I liked quite a bit more (THE LADY HERMIT, JADE RAKSHA).

Two more, one you can skip, one you should see:

RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH (1980)
Dir.: Sun Chung. Cast: Wang Yu (from DIRTY HO, not Jimmy Wang Yu), Chen Kuan Tai, Lo Lieh, Ku Feng. Leading actress: Lin Hsiu Chun, aka Lam Sau Kwan.

I had high hopes for this, given its cast and director. Sun Chung had a great 1-2-3 punch in 1978-79 with AVENGING EAGLE, DEADLY BREAKING SWORD and KUNG FU INSTRUCTOR and this film has three great fighting leads in Wang Yu, Chen Kuan Tai, and Lo Lieh. However, it’s got one of those plots where the hero is hired to carry a sealed box from Point A to Point B, and the audience is kept in the dark about the nature of the mission and what's really going on. Here it’s Wang Yu as a cocky young fighter hired by Prince Yan (Ku Feng) and many people attack him enroute to try to get the box. We don’t find out until the end of the film what’s in the box, why people want it, and the hidden agenda of Prince Yan. By then it’s too late to care. So, for most of the film we don’t know which characters are the good guys and which are the bad guys or what stake they have in the action. As a result, we have no stake in the action and no reason to root for anybody. I quickly lose interest in a film when it becomes clear that the script is going to sacrifice dramatic integrity for a cheap surprise. Suspense comes from knowing more than the characters do, not less. Well-staged fights and good production values, though. But not recommended.

BROTHERS FIVE (1970)
Dir.: Lo Wei. Cast: Cheng Pei Pei; as the five Gao Brothers: Yueh Hua, Chang Yi, Lo Lieh, Chin Han, Kao Yuan; as the villains: Tien Feng, Ku Feng, Wang Hsieh.
Now this is a good one, one of the best first-time viewings among my Shaw Bros. DVDs this year. Here, we learn everything we need to know up front, who the heroes are, who the villains are and why they’re at odds and what they have to do. So, let’s just settle down to the fighting—and there’s lots of it. These are among the most intricate large-scale fight scenes I’ve seen in a Shaw Bros. movie this early outside of Chang Cheh’s work (one can point to his HEROIC ONES the same year). This film's fight director, Hsu Er Niu (aka Simon Chui Yee-ang), first came to my attention in February when I saw DUEL FOR GOLD and did a post on it in the "What have you been watching lately?" thread and Simon Booth pointed out his rep. This one's even better. Each of the five Gao brothers has their own unique weapon and fighting style, e.g. Lo Lieh has a whip and flying daggers, Chin Han plays a blacksmith who fights with a sledgehammer, and Yueh Hua has this sharp metal circle with a hole in the center that he can wear as a hat which he then pulls off, holds in the center and wields it to fight and slash. All five of the lead actors do their own stunts and fighting, often in the midst of quite frenetic, bloody action.

Cheng Pei Pei is a swordswoman seeking revenge against the same guy who’d killed the Gao brothers’ father. So it’s her job to find all five of them and reunite them for a raid on evil Master Long Zhen Feng and the Flying Dragon Villa where the bad guys reside. The scenes where she locates each brother and then brings him to the others are often quite moving. The boys had all been separated as children and all have scars on their left hands that form a line when their hands are placed together, scars left by their father so the brothers would be able to identify each other as adults. So there’s real joy when they all reunite. Cheng’s got a manual for them to learn the 5 Tigers moves that will enable them to combine their skills to beat Master Long’s superior kung fu. She joins in the fighting too, at times, although she steps back for the final bout and lets the five brothers do their thing. Most of the fighting takes place at outdoors locations. Cheng, as always a picture of graceful beauty (or is it beautiful grace?), has to share the stage here with five lead actors, three of whom are strong fighting leads in their own right, but they make a fine ensemble cast and it’s genuinely stirring to see all six together bearing down on Flying Dragon Villa for the furious finale. Lo Lieh turns in another great comically-tinged performance and has the most clever scenes, including one where he takes on the identity of a criminal seeking to join the Flying Dragon gang.

Given the nature of the fighting and the employment of a kung fu manual, I would argue that in any discussion of what the first true kung fu films were, this one should at least be considered. It was, after all, the same year as Jimmy Wang Yu's seminal THE CHINESE BOXER.

RAPE OF THE SWORD (1967) Dir.: Yueh Feng. Cast: Li Li-hua, Li Ching, Chiao Chuang, Chen Hung-lieh, Tien Feng.

Lightweight swordplay adventure about the battle over a treasured super-sharp heirloom sword that is stolen from a swordsman by his treacherous buddy at the beginning of the film. The buddy then gives it to a prince in order to get a job as instructor at the palace, which is where the sword is kept on display (not a lot to discourage thieves). Various parties try to get it back. That’s basically the plot. Not much to work with. Some bandits who are good guys get into the act and their leader (Chiao Chuang) looks like a suitable match for the young heroine played by Li Ching.

The real draw of this film is getting to see Li Li-hua in a starring role. She plays a kung fu expert in hiding as a maid (think Ivy Ling Po’s Scarlet Maid from the Red Lotus trilogy, only operating undercover). She works for rich girl Li Ching who has been betrothed to the prince’s “rascal” son. Li Ching balks at this and Li Li-hua takes her under her wing and agrees to teach her kung fu after they run away from Li Ching's father (Tien Feng, who then disappears from the film).

Li Li-hua was one of the great Hong Kong movie stars of the 1950s and ‘60s and even though this film is beneath her, she’s great to watch. And her scenes with Li Ching as maid/employer; surrogate mother/daughter; protector/protectee; and teacher/student are often quite moving. They work really well together and I love the way they move around each other and the way they talk to each other. Sheer gracefulness. And the way Li Ching recoils from most men and sort of scurries to Li Li-hua’s side for protection when faced with them. Until she learns some kung fu and handles herself with confidence later in the film. The fight scenes, however, are not a big draw, since neither of these actresses was much of a fighter. (For that you'll have to go to LADY HERMIT with Cheng Pei Pei and Shih Szu.)

I want to see more Li Li-hua films (I’ve only seen four before this one). She’s quite a presence with indelibly strong features and an aura that’s quite unlike any other HK star I’ve seen. (Think Susan Hayward or Barbara Stanwyck in a 1950s western to find a suitable Hollywood parallel to this film.)

The music is a mix of Morricone’s melodies from FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, Elmer Bernstein’s cues from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and a bombastic western theme that sounds familiar that I’m guessing is Bernstein’s theme for THE COMANCHEROS.

Plus there are two huangmei opera-style songs, one about 45 min. apart from the other. In one of them, Li Ching convinces the bandit leader to go off and steal the sword back. Were there more songs and were they then cut? The print used for the Celestial DVD is only 78 min., pretty short for a 1967 Shaw Bros. movie with this cast and crew. And Ku Feng has a really small part. Although the Huangmei opera style was being phased out of Shaw Bros. swordplay films by this point.

I'm not sure what the title means.

THE BRAVE ARCHER AND HIS MATE (1982) Dir.: Chang Cheh. Cast: Kuo Chui (Philip Kwok), Huang Shu-yi, Fu Sheng, Candy Wen, Chin Siu-ho, Wang Li, Chan Shen, Chiang Sheng, Lu Feng.

This is the fourth Brave Archer film and comes five years after the first. While the three earlier films were based on Louis Cha's “Legend of the Condor Heroes,” I believe this one was based on the sequel, “Return of the Condor Heroes.” Fu Sheng doesn’t play the role of Kuo Tsing that he played in the first three Brave Archer movies; Kuo Chui plays that part, while Fu Sheng plays his adopted son, Yang Guo, son of Yang Kang, Kuo Tsing’s sworn brother-turned-bitter rival, who dies in the opening sequence. Much of the film takes place after Yang Guo has grown up to be Fu Sheng and is denied kung fu lessons by his adoptive parents, Kuo Tsing and Huang Yung, who are afraid he’ll be a bad seed like his biological father. So the “boy” runs off and secretly learns “frog-style” kung fu from the evil Ouyang Fung or “Western Poison” (Wang Li), which gets him into trouble with his parents and his fellow students. At some point, three of the cast, Kuo Chui, Fu Sheng and Chin Siu-ho, trudge off to Chong Yang Palace to fight a whole new, unrelated set of antagonists played by, among others, two more of the Venoms.

Convoluted, to say the least. Not as good as the earlier Brave Archer movies. The last half-hour takes the film into a whole new narrative direction and it really throws the viewer off because the tensions introduced between Yang Guo and his adoptive parents over their role in his real father’s death are never adequately resolved. Worst of all, Fu Sheng and Chin Siu-ho don’t even get any major fight scenes. Fu Sheng plays his character in a deliberately goofy way that doesn’t quite match the tone of the film. Three of the Venoms, Kuo Chui, Chiang Sheng and Lu Feng, get most of the major fight scenes, which come at the end, along with honorary Venom Wang Li. (Those fight scenes are good, but they don’t carry much dramatic weight, since Chiang Sheng and Lu Feng come into it so late and we don’t know much about them before they start fighting.)

The actress who plays Huang Yung is quite good. She’s Huang Shu-yi and I’ve never heard of her before. She’s not necessarily older, but she’s definitely more mature-looking than the young actresses populating Shaw Bros. films in the early 1980s. A no-nonsense type, with a hard beauty that could have been employed to great effect in Chor Yuen's films. It’s interesting to see the young couple from the three earlier films mature to an older married couple and parents of a grown child and played by different actors. However, once the action shifts to Chong Yang Palace in the last half hour, Huang Yung is out of the story, which hurts the film.

After viewing BRAVE ARCHER AND HIS MATE, I dug out my copy of LITTLE DRAGON MAIDEN (1983), a film I posted about in 2003 and which overlaps with BA&HM. It redoes some scenes but then goes on to continue the story. I get the feeling that a sequel was intended but somehow it left Chang Cheh’s hands and wound up under the guidance of Hua Shan (INFRAMAN) and the project became its own entity, neither a remake nor a sequel, but simply a new telling of “Return of the Condor Heroes,” which also premiered as a series on TV in HK that year. MAIDEN is no classic, but it’s a considerably better film than BA&HM and much more cohesive (while still not exactly a model of cohesion itself). And it’s got two exceedingly attractive and charismatic young stars in the making, Leslie Cheung, as Yang Guo, and Mary Jean Reimer (Weng Ching Ching) as the “Dragon Girl” whom Yang Guo hooks up with. (Leslie, of course, did indeed become a star, while Mary quit the business to marry Lau Kar Leung—his gain, our loss.) Chen Kuan Tai and the wonderful Liu Hsueh-hua (rapidly becoming a favorite of mine) play the parents, Kuo Tsing and Huang Yung, who take Yang Guo under their wings, but as a grown boy here, not as a baby as in BA&HM. Lo Lieh plays the crazy kung fu teacher who trains Yang Guo in “toad-style” kung fu and he delivers a much more decidedly comic performance than Wang Li did in the same role in the earlier film. Also, unlike the BRAVE ARCHER films, this one actually features our beloved Condor.

Now I want to see both TV series--“Legend of the Condor Heroes” (1982) and “Return of the Condor Heroes” (1983). One question I have about these series for anyone who’s seen them: were they done on film or video? I tried checking out clips on YouTube, but the quality was so poor that I couldn’t tell.

I've got both of them and I'd say film. Picture quality is too good for it to be video tape. Subtitles are meh...I've seen better, I've seen worse. Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre is available too; might as well complete the trilogy.

Hello,

This post is just a bit more info on Li Li-hua. Chinese film scholar and archivist Guo Hua has noted that Li came from a storied Beijing acting family and seems to have joined the acting profession early in life--not quite a child star but also not just some casual studio "discovery." She had a really interesting career because she acted in dozens of flims on the mainland prior to 1949 in addition to many more made after that date in Hong Kong and Taiwan. What may be of interest to some Mobians is that she actually co-starred in a Hollywood movie way back when: the 1958 Victor Mature war drama "China Doll" (MGM.) See:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MTFFR2/imdb-adbox/

Sounds quite a bit better than that Adam Sandler-Zhang Ziyi movie idea that was floating around a few years ago. Anyway, a fine potted bio on Li Li-hua and her work can be found in:

Guo Hua, _Oldtime Movie Stars, Oldtime Movies_ (Beijing: Chinese Cinematic Press, 1998), pp. 292-6 [ISBN: 7-106-01351-X/G-0374].

Is there a list online somewhere of all the recent reissues? I want them all but can't keep up!


thanks,
marc

Download Catalogue

The above link will take you to a page at Celestial Pictures where you fill out a form with a name & email address and then you'll be forwarded to a page where you can download Celestial's Shaw Bros catalogues (pdf).

The long-awaited SUPER NINJAS (1982, aka FIVE ELEMENTS NINJAS) is in the latest batch that came out last Friday. I haven't picked it up yet, but a copy is waiting for me at my source for these DVDs.

A delightful comic piece…

ODE TO GALLANTRY (1982)
Dir.: Chang Cheh.
Cast: Kuo Chui, Tang Ching, Liu Hui Ling, Candy Wen Hsueh Erh, Wang Li, Sun Chien, Chiang Sheng, Chan Shen. Based on a novel by Louis Cha.

This is another among my best first-time viewings of SB DVDs this year. Interesting that I picked this one to view next without knowing beforehand that it was based on a Louis Cha/Jin Yong story just like the last two I watched (BRAVE ARCHER AND HIS MATE and LITTLE DRAGON MAIDEN). This one’s much less convoluted and actually tells a story with a clear beginning, middle and end, with the focus on one key character who goes through a lot of changes and winds up doing a lot of heroic things.

If there can be any such thing as a sweet and charming Chang Cheh martial arts film, then this is it. And a lot of the credit goes to Kuo Chui, who plays the dual role of a bumbling, lost mountain boy who knows his name only as “Bastard,” and, much later in the film, the lookalike rogue clan member, Shi Zhongyu, who’s done a lot of harm and whom everyone’s been mistaking the mountain boy for. In the course of it, “Bastard,” in a set of machinations too complicated to set down here, attains “supreme power” and hasn’t the foggiest idea of what to do with it until Shi Zhongyu’s cute and spunky fiancee, Dingding Dangdang (the always wonderful Candy Wen Hsueh Erh), spends a month teaching him martial arts.

I’ve always said that Kuo Chui (aka Philip Kwok, "Lizard" from the Five Venoms) was one of the best actors among Shaw’s martial arts stars. He is not only great at character comedy--as a simple, starving, uneducated young man confused by everyone’s agendas and only gradually gaining control of the situation—but also physical comedy, as we see during the training sequence and the fight scenes that pile up at the end, as he deigns to protect his new-found comrades and put up some furious fights on their behalf, even though he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of this kung fu thing. There’s a great bit late in the film where each of the two lookalikes has to impersonate the other and it’s fun to watch the difficulty each has putting the subterfuge over because of the different body language and vocal inflections used for each character and the failure of each lookalike to grasp the other’s behavioral quirks and accents. In scene after scene, Kuo is genuinely funny. As I watched him, I kept thinking, “He could have been Jackie Chan!”

And not only funny, but touching. His “Bastard” is that rare martial arts character who’s sincerely uninterested in power or fighting. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody. He only wants to get back to his mother and his mountain home, which he was trying to find his way back to when he got caught up in everyone else’s manipulative behavior. So when he actually gains power, he only uses it to help others, never to gain anything for himself, and only when there’s no other recourse.

The other actors are all good, too, with special praise for a pair I was unfamiliar with, Tang Ching and Liu Hui-ling, who play the parents, Mr. and Madame Shi, of the rogue lookalike, who wind up wishing the good-hearted “Bastard” was their real son.

This is one of the few SB martial arts films I’ve seen where there are no real bad guys.

Yet another top-notch Louis Cha/Jin Yong adaptation.

THE SWORD STAINED WITH ROYAL BLOOD (1981)
Dir.: Chang Cheh. Based on novel by Louis Cha/Jin Yong.
Cast: 3 of the 5 Venoms: Kuo Chui/Philip Kwok, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng.
Plus: Candy Wen Hsueh-erh, Ching Li, Wang Li, Chan Shen, Lung Tien-hsiang.

Like ODE TO GALLANTRY, this one’s very good, although the storyline is quite a bit more complicated. But it all plays out very well and has a superb martial arts climax. What made it more interesting than usual to me was its central relationship between hero Kuo Chui and heroine Candy Wen Hsueh-erh. It’s really central to the film and gives it an appeal of a different sort than we get from the usual Chang Cheh martial arts spectacular. Long story short: Kuo Chui’s the son of a murdered Ming Patriot and he’s raised by a kung fu expert. He locates the secret chamber where Golden Snake Bandit died and in it he finds a kung fu manual, some weapons and some instructions. He follows the instructions and winds up meeting Wen Qing (Candy), a fighting beauty who poses as a man. They become “sworn brothers” and he winds up meeting Candy’s mom, Ching Li, who’d been abducted by Golden Snake Bandit 18 or 20 years earlier and fallen in love with him and aroused the ire of her clan. A lengthy flashback with Golden Snake Bandit (Lung Tien-hsiang) ensues. Eventually Candy reveals that she’s a woman and makes no secret of her feelings for Kuo Chui. She’s quite a headstrong, impetuous personality, and very cute to boot, which plays well off of Kuo’s more calm, deliberate but graceful manner. Nice series of fights saved for the end involving various “arrays” (including the 5 Elements Array) and featuring Kuo Chui against fellow Venoms Lu Feng and Chiang Sheng and “honorary venom” Wang Li. Good stuff all the way through.

Candy Wen Hsueh-erh’s performance really stands out. This is the best I’ve ever seen her. She’s the leading female character and she’s quite a bundle of energy, first as Kuo Chui’s “sworn brother,” eager to earn his affection as a friend, and then as herself, eager to gain his love as a mate. I’ve also seen her in SWORDSMAN AND ENCHANTRESS, THE BRAVE ARCHER AND HIS MATE, ODE TO GALLANTRY, and HOLY FLAME OF THE MARTIAL WORLD, but this must be the first time I’ve seen her in a leading role. And she’s got great chemistry with Kuo Chui, who is, as always, very good, this time in a straight heroic role as someone who emerges from a cloistered existence and winds up righting various wrongs. Ching Li’s very good, too, playing Candy’s mother, quite a dramatic character burdened with a past of heartache, grief and familial mistreatment. Just those three alone make this film something special, but when you add in the other Venoms and the usual lineup of superb Shaw character actors, you have a winner.

I even dug out and watched the 1993 non-Shaw wire-fu version of this film, for comparison’s sake, which stars Yuen Biao, Cheung Man, Danny Lee, Anita Yuen, and Elvis Tsui. It’s only vaguely recognizable as based on the same source material. The Golden Snake Bandit is not dead in this one, but is a major character (played by Danny Lee). Candy’s character seems to be divided up into two or three other female characters. It’s very disjointed and I found it quite a chore to sit through. Once upon a time, when I was just discovering wire-fu and sitting through things like HOLY WEAPON and LEGEND OF THE LIQUID SWORD without complaining, I’m sure I would have tolerated this "new wave" version of SWORD more easily, but now that I have so many better, similarly themed films to compare it to, thanks to the Shaw DVDs, I really don’t need to tolerate it at all.

VENGEANCE IS A GOLDEN BLADE (1969)
Dir.: Ho Meng-hua. Cast: Chin Ping, Tang Ching, Kao Pao Shu, Yueh Hua, Ku Wen-tsung, Li Peng-fei.

This one has above-average acting for an old Shaw Bros. swordplay film and comes with a compelling storyline that makes up for the cutback in fight scenes. It’s all about a father-daughter relationship involving a crippled hero and the daughter he trains in swordfighting and what happens when the daughter’s mother comes back into her life. An imperious woman running a brothel, the mother offers luxury goods, elegant clothing and fine things and tries to tempt the girl away from the simple, rural, martial-arts-training-on-an-herb farm lifestyle she’s endured with her father, who’d been maimed at the beginning of the film in an ambush by the Vicious Brothers of Long, who are now allies of his former wife. The father spends most of the film perfecting a powerful blade which will counter the Golden Blade stolen from him by the Long brothers. The girl has become a good fighter, but she’s been sheltered from the larger world and had always thought her mother was dead. Angry at her father for lying to her, she even leaves him at one point to join her mother at the brothel for a very interesting scene. What is the mother’s true agenda?

It’s all very dramatic and wonderfully acted by Chin Ping as the daughter, Tang Ching as the father and Kao Pao Shu as the mother. I know Chin Ping from the Red Lotus trilogy (TEMPLE OF THE RED LOTUS TRILOGY, TWIN SWORDS, THE SWORD AND THE LUTE), where she played Jimmy Wang Yu’s beautiful swordfighting wife. I know Tang Ching from ODE TO GALLANTRY, which I covered in an earlier post. And Kao Pao Shu was in various 1960s Shaw Bros. musicals and dramas and went on to direct kung fu films including BLOOD OF THE DRAGON with Jimmy Wang Yu and BANDITS, PROSTITUTES AND SILVER with Angela Mao. The role of the daughter here would have been a very good one for Cheng Pei Pei and would have allowed her to stretch her acting wings a bit more. I imagine they cast Chin Ping because they thought she’d be better in the emotional scenes and conveying the vulnerability of the character, esp. in the scenes at the brothel, but she’s not much of a convincing fighter, so the swordfighting scenes suffer a bit. (And I believe Cheng Pei Pei was a good enough actress to handle the emotional demands of the role.)

One other quibble: we don’t see the main sword in action until the very end, meaning there’s a lot of build-up but when the goods are delivered, they're too little, too late. I don't think that would have been the case if Cheng Pei Pei had starred.

Still, I recommend it for the interesting story and relationships and strong acting.

I have a backlog of eight SB DVDs to report on, mostly run-of-the-mill swordplay films, but I wanted to leap ahead of the queue and cover a bonafide classic, which I watched last night just to see some genuinely innovative Shaw Bros. filmmaking for a change and remind me why I’d signed onto all of this in the first place.

It’s HEROES OF THE EAST (1979, aka SHAOLIN CHALLENGES NINJA) and it’s the first time I’ve seen the Celestial DVD and, hence, the first time I’ve seen it in its original language. This is the one where Gordon Liu plays a Chinese kung fu expert who marries a beautiful Japanese wife (Yuka Mizuno, listed on IMDB as Yuko Mizuno) and then suffers arguments with her about which country has the superior martial arts, culminating in a series of bouts Gordon has with eight different Japanese martial arts masters (played, surprisingly, by actual Japanese martial artists, as we learn in the original trailer included on the DVD). Seeing this version, I learn that most of the Japanese in the cast actually speak Japanese on the original soundtrack. (The two Japanese co-stars, Mizuno and Yasuaki Kurata, speak some Japanese but mostly Mandarin.)

There’s a great scene where Gordon has to learn Drunken Boxing in order to counter the karate expert, so he and his kung fu classmates seek out an old drunk at the market who knows it and the only way they can get him to show his moves is to provoke him into fighting with them so Gordon can watch and take mental notes. Director Lau Kar Leung plays the drunk. It’s a very clever scene and representative of the originality director Lau brought to these films. Another great kung fu authority figure, Simon Yuen, fresh off Jackie Chan’s DRUNKEN MASTER, plays Gordon’s kung fu teacher.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way it treats the very palpable cultural differences between China and Japan, played out in any number of scenes, whether it’s about what to wear at a wedding, how to eat, or how to react after a bout is finished. And also about the emphasis in Chinese martial arts on the execution of a move versus Japan’s emphasis on the result. It also may be the first kung fu film in which the Japanese characters and their martial arts are treated with respect and the Japanese characters are all played by Japanese. Gordon’s two co-stars, Yuka Mizuno and Yasuaki Kurata, both come off well and are quite charismatic. Their scenes and the whole basic relationship look forward to Jet Li’s film of 15 years later, FIST OF LEGEND, which also featured a Japanese wife (GAMERA’s Shinobu Nakayama) and which cast Kurata in a very similar role to the one he plays here.

If I have any quibble, it’s that the fight scenes with the eight Japanese masters pile on one after the other with very few breaks and few of the necessary dramatic scenes between Gordon and Yuka. I was kind of numbed by the time of the extended final fight, arguably the best in the film, between Gordon and ninjitsu Kurata. There should have been more of a dramatic buildup or at least a tender scene between Gordon and his wife preceding the final fight.

But it’s still, overall, one of the best kung fu films to come out of the Shaw studio. And no character gets killed or even seriously injured in it.

Two Shaolin films directed by Tang Chia…

SHAOLIN INTRUDERS (1983)
Cast: Derek Yee, Jason Pai Piao, Phillip Ko (aka Kao Fei), Liu Yu-po, Chan Shen, Lee Hoi-san, Ku Feng, Elvis Tsui.

SHAOLIN PRINCE (1982)
Cast: Ti Lung, Derek Yee, Jason Pai Piao, Ku Feng, Lee Hoi San, Chan Shen, Elvis Tsui, Liu Yu-po.

Director Tang Chia was once Lau Kar Leung’s partner in directing fight scenes, mostly for Chang Cheh, and when Lau became a director, Tang went to work for Chu Yuan and later directed three films on his own (the third being OPIUM AND THE KUNG FU MASTER, 1984, which is on my to-watch pile). While Lau was perfecting more serious kung fu staging, Tang was going all gimmicky, plunging into the use of wires and all sorts of props. There’s a lot of action with benches in SHAOLIN INTRUDERS, including one scene where the benches are piled high up and the opponents have to fight it out atop them without ever touching the floor.

INTRUDERS has nonstop fight scenes, mostly with exotic weapons and props, and a fairly simple plot designed to allow for the fights, involving various clans getting killed off by four masked ninja-style killers who are believed to originate from Shaolin Temple. The Abbot at Shaolin (Chan Shen) is horrified at the accusation and allows the three heroes, Derek Yee, Jason Pai-Piao and a fighting actress I’d never seen before, Liu Yu-po, to come in and investigate, but only if they can make it past various fighting obstacles (no bronze men, though).

It’s well-shot, acted and staged, making for a lot of lightweight fun, but no real edge, no substance to it, the way you’d get in a Lau Kar Leung film. There are two significant non-Shaw old-school kung fu stars on hand in Phillip Ko and Lee Hoi-san, both of whom play key fighting monks at Shaolin and their presence significantly enhances the film, giving it some old-school bonafides. Jason Pai Piao plays a humorous character, a good guy but a womanizer and inveterate gambler, who nevertheless does his share of the fighting. Liu Yu-po is quite a hard-edged, interesting actress and has a major role here as a fighter with retractable blades that come out of her sleeves. I'm intrigued by her. Unfortunately, she didn’t make many films. She’s also in SHAOLIN PRINCE, in the role of a spirit-possessed girl, but it’s a small part. She's also in another Shaw film I've since seen, PORTRAIT IN CRYSTAL, in which she plays the title "character." More on that one in a future post.

I previously saw SHAOLIN PRINCE in an English dub under the title, DEATH MASK OF THE NINJA. It has lots of fight scenes, often with weapons or various gimmicks, and a lot of wire work. Plot: two baby princes, one of them the Crown Prince, are rescued after a coup, but raised apart, one at Shaolin Temple and one at the Prime Minister’s house. They grow up to be Ti Lung and Derek Yee. Derek, raised by the P.M., knows his heritage while Ti, raised at Shaolin by the “three dumb masters,” doesn’t. They inadvertently become allies and eventually learn they’re brothers. Not much depth. Simple story. Comic relief by the three "dumb masters." Plenty of good fight scenes, but, again, they lack the edge they would have under Chang Cheh and Lau Kar Leung. I like SHAOLIN INTRUDERS better – it was more concise, had a better story, and less comedy.

Still, you could do worse for light kung fu entertainment than both of these films.

LONG ROAD TO GALLANTRY (1984) 88 min.
Dir.: Lung Yi-sheng. Cast: Ho Chia-chin (aka Kenny Ho), Kara Hui Ying Hung, Rosamund Kwan, Jason Pai Piao, Lily Li (cameo), Chen Kuan Tai, Lung Tien-hsiang.

This is actually quite a good hyperactive late kung fu film from Shaw Bros. with an energetic and engaging star whom I’d never heard of before—Ho Chia-chin, who upon research turns out to be one Kenny Ho, who was also in PROJECT A II and POLICE STORY II, although I’d have to see both again to see who he was. He has charm and good looks and he fights well, too.

Better yet, Kara Hui Ying Hung plays one of the two lead roles and it’s probably her best role outside of the films she starred in for Lau Kar Leung (MY YOUNG AUNTIE, LEGENDARY WEAPONS OF CHINA, 8-DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER, et al). She plays a strong personality with an interesting relationship with the hero that goes through various changes. And she does a LOT of fighting. (Yaaayyy!!) Rosamund Kwan plays the third leading role and it’s probably the earliest film I’ve seen her in. She’s quite good as well, and quite attractive. She doesn’t do much fighting, though. She has a thing for the hero also, so there’s an appealing almost-sort-of-love triangle going on here that keeps things hopping between the fights.

Kenny plays a young hero coming out of seclusion who’s told by his sifu to use his skills to help people out. So he does. And gets into trouble for it. Kara doesn’t need his help—she’s trying to infiltrate the Thunder Gang by being taken prisoner, but Kenny’s rescue of her balls things up. There’s a lot of humor here. It’s all about a conflict over age-old kung fu manuals between the Dragon Sect and the murderous Thunder Gang and the two heroines, Kara and Rosamund, have some kind of traumatic past revealed in a flashback early on involving a raid by one kung fu couple on a house and an attempt to steal the manuals and babies being separated from parents and such, a scene we’ve seen in quite a few of these films. (I think the non-Shaw JADE BOW from 1966 was the first one I’ve seen like this.) So the girls have issues with the father figures who raised them, Jason Pai Piao and Chen Kuan Tai. A light touch throughout most of the film is upended by a sudden devastating emotional ending. I wasn’t prepared for it.

Nice costumes for the girls. Well-staged fight scenes. Some outdoors location work, but mostly done in the studio. Recommended, especially for fans of these two actresses.

The director is Lung Yi-sheng, who’d never registered with me before. He’s good. According to some website I picked this up from:

“He…joined the film industry as a stuntman, and was soon promoted to martial arts choreographer to work on Patrick Tam’s defining work THE SWORD, Taylor Wong’s BUDDHA'S PALM, and Hua Shan’s PORTRAIT IN CRYSTAL. He had also tried his hands at directing with DEMON OF THE LUTE and LONG ROAD TO GALLANTRY.”

Okay, I’ve seen all those films. BUDDHA’S PALM is great and the one other film he actually directed, DEMON OF THE LUTE, was quite enjoyable as well and also had a great part for Kara (as did BUDDHA’S PALM). I wasn’t that crazy about PORTRAIT IN CRYSTAL. I don’t remember much about THE SWORD.

No wonder LONG ROAD TO GALLANTRY reminded me of JADE BOW. It's a remake of it! I just went back and checked my notes from my first viewing of JADE BOW (7 years ago!) and my plot description matches that of GALLANTRY.

Playing catch-up…

TWELVE DEADLY COINS (1969) 84 min.
Dir.: Hsu Cheng-hung.
Cast: Lo Lieh, Ching Li, Tien Feng, Fang Mien, Wu Ma.

Fairly enjoyable swordplay/ “coinplay” movie. Plus some other weapons--the antagonist (Fang Mien) is an “Iron Thorn” specialist. What distinguishes this one is the chemistry between Lo Lieh and Ching Li as lovers on opposite sides of a battle between a security bureau and an outlaw gang over something that happened in the past.

Security officer Lo Lieh and female bandit Ching Li refrain from killing each other in their first battle, prompting charges by Lo Lieh’s people that he’s a traitor. The feelings between Lo and Ching blossom into romance. There’s a great scene midway through the film where the two have tender moments played out as they’re both tied to posts across a room from each other as the room is filling up with water to drown them. Ching Li gets quite emotional. It works.

Plus, there’s lots of fighting and bloodshed. Nice location shooting—lots of outdoor scenes, probably shot in Taiwan. Nice Chinese music score. Not the most intricate swordplay movie I’ve seen from Shaw, but a nice one.

A “lost” Chang Cheh epic…

THE PIRATE (1973) dir.: Chang Cheh/co-directors: Pao Hsueh Li, Wu Ma.
Stars: Ti Lung, David Chiang (curiously billed as a guest star).
Low-profile supporting cast: Tien Ching, Fan Mei-sheng, Dean Shek, Billy Tang, Yu Feng, Yuan Man Tzu.

Ti Lung plays pirate captain Chang Pao Chai. Fortunately he doesn’t wear an eyepatch or one of those big-brimmed hats or a pegleg, nor does he carry a cutlass. There’s a ship battle at the beginning, employing real ships in a real bay (in Taiwan, probably). The Chinese pirates fight a foreign ship where the officers speak English and wear 18th century-style military costumes pulled at random off a costume rack. The cannons on each ship shoot at each other for several minutes and only one cannonball hits its target, damaging the pirate ship. Studio caution regarding expensive props yields diminished excitement.

The pirates anchor offshore and go into town to get building materials to fix the ship. An undercover general (David Chiang) is in the area looking for the pirates. Ti Lung, displaying classic Robin Hood tendencies, is appalled at the local officials’ collusion with a corrupt merchant, Tien Ching, to keep the fishermen in debt. Tien Ching’s crafty sister (Yu Feng) wants to grab the pirates and collect the bounty herself. Ti Lung promises to have some money delivered to the fishermen (to be taken from the treasure chests the pirates took from the English).

One clever scene has Ti Lung being mistaken for David’s undercover general so he starts playing the part and making demands and letting the local officials kowtow to him. When David himself shows up, Ti has to think quickly…making for the best scene in the movie. Blustery Fan Mei-sheng plays a rival pirate, a prisoner who escapes and swims out to Ti Lung’s ship and takes it over. There’s a lot of back-and-forth, none of it adding up to much, with whole plot threads ignored for long stretches.

The big fight finale on the beach between Ti and his crew and all the bad guys comes about 25 minutes too soon. It should have been at the end. Instead, in the last ten minutes we get a big, anti-climactic fight between Ti and David on the beach, even though there’s been no drama between them, no build-up, no real reason for them to fight. In fact, it’s already been established that they like each other. Sure, it’s always nice to see these two go at it, but in BLOOD BROTHERS (a Chang Cheh martial arts epic done the same year), David and Ti go mano a mano in a ferocious finale, but it’s taken two solid hours of conflict and rage and betrayal to lead up to it. Nothing like that here. This is more like a gentlemen’s sporting match. Not what we look for in a Chang Cheh film. Liu Chia Liang and Tang Chia did the fights, although it’s not their best work. David Chiang is billed as a guest star, although he clearly has the second leading role after Ti.

There are a couple of good actresses I’ve seen before, sexy bad girl Yu Feng (ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS), who fights, and cute good girl Yuan Man Tzu (SHAOLIN MARTIAL ARTS), who doesn’t.

It’s apparently based on a true story that took place in the first decade of the 19th century, although we don’t find this out till some onscreen text at the very end of the film. And the real events took place in Hong Kong.

So this isn’t some unsung classic from Chang Cheh waiting to be rediscovered, although I’d urge Chang Cheh completists to see it anyway

The original trailer is included on the disc and it offers lines of priceless text like “A Big Budget Movie!” and “Shaw Bros. Possesses the Requisite Resources.”

Not surprising, they're both adaptations of the Gu Long book Log of a Wandering Swordsman (1960).

SUPER NINJAS in the house!….

FIVE ELEMENT NINJAS (1982)
(onscreen title: FIVE ELEMENTS NINJAS / title on DVD case and in original trailer: FIVE ELEMENT NINJAS)
103 min.
Dir.: Chang Cheh.
Cast: Lo Meng and a bunch of people I’m seriously unfamiliar with. Well, all right, I am familiar with Michael Chan Wai Man, Lung Tien-hsiang, and Chan Shen. But that’s it. Low-wattage cast.

First time I’ve seen this in its original Mandarin. I’d previously seen the English dub, titled SUPER NINJAS, on a VHS edition I bought at Chiller Theater some years ago. I believe that was an uncut copy of the film.

The star of this film is Cheng Tien Chi (aka Ricky Cheng Tien Chi). According to one website listing of his films, he’s been in 12 other films that I’ve seen, but he was probably in small parts. He never registered with me, even though I’ve seen this film twice before. He’s not much of an actor and he can’t really carry the movie. And aside from Lo Meng, one of the Five Venoms—who doesn’t have the biggest part here--there are no standout kung fu stars to beef up the cast. This bothered me. Why didn’t they put all Five Venoms in it? What Kuo Chui could have done with the leading role! Were they trying to create a new generation of kung fu stars? Well, if so, they sure didn’t succeed.

There’s an interesting female character in Junko, a Japanese female ninja who goes undercover at the good guys’ compound as a Chinese girl named Ah Shun. She’s a bad girl, but she starts to genuinely like the hero. Or so I believe. Unless it was all a ruse. The ambiguity gives the film its only dramatic interest. She’s quite an interesting actress, too. Not conventionally pretty, but with strong features, an earthy quality with a bit of fire (hey—that’s two of the elements right there!), and good acting chops. Not your usual Shaw starlet. The original trailer tells us her name is Chen Pei-hsi. Never heard of her before. Her credits on some website list a bunch of films I’m unfamiliar with: THE PURE AND THE EVIL, TEENAGE DREAMERS, MEN FROM THE GUTTER, RAPE AND DIE, SILENT ROMANCE, and CREAM, SODA AND MILK, which is cited in the trailer as something she’s “from,” only it’s listed as CREAM SODA AND MILK (Lower East Side version, I presume).

The fight staging is very good in parts and is the film’s chief draw, although it’s too dependent on wire work for my tastes. The most clever parts involve the hero and his new “brothers” showing their mastery of the specific weapons necessary to defeat the different Element Ninjas. But there’s no drama. No real characters to root for or care for. (I found myself caring most about Junko, the duplicitous ninja woman.) It’s basically a three-act structure: the first wave of good guys take on the Five Element Ninjas; the entire ninja band attacks the compound where the remaining good guys have holed up; and the hero flees to find a teacher and some helpers to learn the techniques needed to beat the ninjas in the third act. That’s it. The subplot involving the girl offers the two lead heroes their only real chance to interact with another significant character.

I couldn’t find a credit for who choreographed the fights.

The film is famous for its blood and gore including a bit involving a hanging intestine that turns out not to be anywhere near as gory as kung fu movie lore would have us believe. It’s more comical than anything else. There are about three memorable dismemberments, but overall it didn’t seem appreciably gorier than other bloody Chang Cheh swordplay movies. Maybe I’m just jaded.

All the Japanese parts are played by Chinese actors and not a word of Japanese is spoken. (Contrast this with HEROES OF THE EAST.)

I’m glad I finally saw it in its original version, but I wish it had a better cast. Where was Shaw’s A-list when this was going into production? John Charles gives the film 5 out of 10 stars in his “Hong Kong Filmography” and notes that it is “rather crudely made, and Chang’s new group of fighters sorely lack the charisma of their predecessors.” So I’m not the only fan who thinks this one is over-rated.

More Chang Cheh...

KING EAGLE (1970) dir.: Chang Cheh
Cast: Ti Lung, Li Ching (in dual role), Chang Pei Shan, Chen Sing, Kang Hua, Ching Miao, Cheng Lei, Wang Chung, Billy Tang, Wong Kwong Yue, Tang Chia, Yuen Wo Ping.

KING EAGLE is a minor Chang Cheh swordplay film from 1970 that nonetheless has a few major points of interest for Shaw fans. The beautiful Li Ching (THE LONG CHASE, RAPE OF THE SWORD, HONG KONG RHAPSODY) has a dual role as two sisters who are the 7th and 8th Chiefs of the Tien Yi Tong Clan, which is riven with a bloody factional battle that puts the sisters on opposite sides. (They even fight each other at one point.) The 7th Chief is a good girl and the 8th is in league with the villains and both are drawn in broad melodramatic strokes. The bad one calls herself “the greatest beauty in the martial arts world” and gets upset when the hero ignores her. The good one’s no slouch in the looks department either.

Ti Lung plays Jin Fei, or “King Eagle,” a lone hero who tries to stay out of the fray, minding his own business. He’s strong, stoic and a lethal killer when necessary and not one to tolerate other people’s games. At one point early on he’s offered a tray of money to join the bad guys’ side and he turns it down, insisting that all he really wants is to avenge the senseless killings of a waiter and farm girl at a roadside inn by two of the bad chief’s henchmen. So he walks up to the culprits and aims blows simultaneously at both their foreheads, killing them on the spot.

Ti gets involved after the good sister tends to his wounds after a fight and the two eventually fall for each other. He’s a hard guy who has never asked anybody for help and he gradually realizes it’s not a bad thing to have someone in his corner. He displays some genuine tenderness here and it reminds us that Chang Cheh didn’t always shy away from romance and strong women characters. It all comes down to a dilemma of what to do about the bad sister. The good one insists that, in the impending showdown, the bad one be spared no matter what. Ti correctly notes that the bad sister will show no such compunction about her when push comes to shove, but good Li doesn’t want to hear it. Interesting dramatic touch here.

Good cast, too, with kung fu great Chen Sing along for the ride as a bad chief whose weapon of choice is a pair of rectangular metal plates that can do a lot of damage. Kang Hua (aka Tung Li), whom I liked when he played a hero in BLACK TAVERN, is another bad guy. He looks like Lee Van Cleef. Cheng Lei and Wang Chung are two other good guys and there are a lot of the usual familiar Shaw Bros. actors around. Tang Chia, who co-directed the fights with someone whose name I didn’t recognize and didn’t note, turns up onscreen as a hired killer with a whip who gives Ti Lung a hard time. He sends a heavy wagon loaded with sacks careening down a street into a group of children, thus forcing Ti to stop the wagon with his strength to prevent it from running over a girl. As Ti holds the wagon and tries to get someone to wedge the wheel so they can move the girl, Tang Chia kills anyone who tries to help and then launches a vicious attack on Ti. Hardcore stuff.

If I have any complaint about this one, it’s that the fights are all very short and the antagonists too easily dispatched. We don’t see the extended battles that Chang’s later films would feature.

This is the 63rd film I’ve seen that was directed by Chang Cheh. I do believe that makes him the director I’ve seen the most films by. And there are still quite a few I have yet to catch up with (SINGING KILLER, HEAVEN AND HELL, BUTTERFLY CHALICE, anyone?). In contrast, I went looking through the filmographies of various Hollywood directors I’ve followed over the decades and barely made 40 on even the most prolific ones (e.g. Roger Corman). The only one who comes close is John Ford, who has directed 48 that I’ve seen, if I include his documentaries. And I still have more Fords to go.

John Ford and Chang Cheh – imagine a retrospective of double bills like the following:

THE SEARCHERS and ONE-ARMED SWORDSMAN
FORT APACHE and SHAOLIN TEMPLE
THE GRAPES OF WRATH and BOXER FROM SHANTUNG
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and FIVE SHAOLIN MASTERS
THE QUIET MAN and THE ASSASSIN
THEY WERE EXPENDABLE and NAVAL COMMANDOS
MARY OF SCOTLAND and MARCO POLO (according to IMDB, Ford was an uncredited director on ADVENTURES OF MARCO POLO in 1938, so there's a point of commonality here)

Now that's a film course I’d love to teach. :D

I watched HEAVEN & HELL (the Image disc) last Sunday. Definitely not typical Chang Cheh. It's divided into three different segments, Heaven, Earth, Hell. The Heaven segment looks like pretty typical Heaven (Jade Emperor, fairies, etc...); Earth is interesting because about 3/4's of it looks and plays like the Braodway Ballet in SINGING IN THE RAIN. There was one fight with Fu Sheng and a bunch of thugs where the boundary between martial arts choreography and dance choreography was really blurred. Hell is the longest segment, and while there are fights in all three segments, Hell contains the most fights and longest fights. Hell is the most fantastical (Heaven notwithstanding). You get to sightsee different Chinese Hells like Cold Hell, Gambling Hell, Plow Hell, etc... Typically, for a latter Chang Cheh movie, the women are mostly window dressing, the guys do all the heavy lifting.

It isn't easily compared to BUDDAH'S PALM, HOLY FLAME OF THE MARTIAL WORLD, BASTARD SWORDSMAN, etc... which might be your fist inclination. This is more like, "Whoa, what the hell was that?".

What the well-dressed Chinese swordswoman should wear…

KILLER DARTS (1968) dir.: Ho Meng-hua.
Cast: Chin Ping, Yueh Hua, Fang Mien, Chang Pei Shan, Peng Peng, plus: Ku Feng, Han Ying Chieh, Dean Shek, Wei Ping Ao in villain cameos.

Same director and stars as VENGEANCE IS A GOLDEN BLADE (1969) and similar in a lot of ways, especially in its father-daughter dynamic and the casting of Chin Ping and Yueh Hua as young leads slated for romance. And it’s about as good. Here, the father (Fang Mien) is a kung fu teacher who adopts a young female orphan whose parents had been killed by the teacher’s chief student, who’d raped the mother and then killed both parents. The girl keeps the dart that killed her mother and, years later, after training in the 36 sword styles and inner power, she learns that the dart is her teacher’s special weapon. Her mind poisoned by lies told her by the chief student, the real culprit who’s now in league with the bandits who’d killed the teacher’s wife and servants at the beginning of the film, the girl turns against her teacher believing him responsible for her mother’s death. It all leads to a big climactic resolution at the bandits’ fortress, a massive structure outfitted with all kinds of improbable mechanical traps powered by giant gears and such—manufactured no doubt by cheap labor at a 12th century Chinese sweat shop/factory. Ku Feng, Han Ying Chieh, Dean Shek, and Wei Ping Ao play a quartet of hired killers who figure in the final action.

Again, as with VENGEANCE IS A GOLDEN BLADE, Chin Ping is cast not for her swordplay skills (paging Cheng Pei Pei!), but for her ability to handle the demands of several emotional scenes. She parades a dazzling array of colorful swordswoman fashions and always looks gorgeous. Yet she's also a good actress and a compelling screen presence who provides the emotional core of the film. Yueh Hua plays the son of the kung fu teacher and he grows up with Chin Ping and they seem headed for marriage, except for the fact that their whole group, sent into hiding at the beginning of the film, is now living and working on the estate of a rich merchant and the merchant has a daughter who has the hots for Yueh Hua herself, which pisses Chin Ping off. (I don’t know the name of this second actress.)

Fast-paced, engaging story, very well shot and staged. Lots of action, much of it outdoors. Beautiful photography, nice sets. Music—the entire score is taken from: THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

I had fun with this one. And I’m rapidly becoming more and more of a Chin Ping fan. (She’s also in THE MAGNIFICENT TRIO, TRAIL OF THE BROKEN BLADE, HONG KONG NOCTURNE, TWELVE GOLD MEDALLIONS and the RED LOTUS trilogy.)

To Mr. Camp:

I've enjoyed some of the your reviews thus far, especially since I might be able to see some of these films since I have access to something to watch them on--finally! Anyway, yesterday I rented out and watched a Mainland Chinese gangster drama titled TOTAL DESTRUCTION. It looked as if it was made in the early '90's (there was no date given on the back of the DVD cover) looked to be very well made,and I didn't see one recognizable face in it (from HK movies,that is). It's about a hardcore tough-talking,street-fighting policeman named Zhang who gets transferred to a small town that's pretty much run by corrupt gangsters. When the triads find out the hard way that Zhang's not gonna back off until he takes down the whole gang, large-scale shootouts between the police and criminals ensue, as well as some excellent fighting scenes (kung fu thrown in of course). The situations start to escalate when Zhang suddenly gets removed from a murder case that may be related to some gangland activities, and ends up having to fight for his life.

All in all, a pretty strong action/drama flick worth hunting down. Unfortunately,I couldn't find anything about it on the IMDB--all that kept coming up was a video game with the title TOTAL DESTRUCTION. Went to the HKMDB site, but I had to re-register and wait 'til I'm cleared for access. Have you or anyone heard of this film?

Also saw a whole batch of Shaw Bros/Celestial trailers on the DVD, which looked great---never thought I'd see LEGENDARY WEAPONS OF CHINA, of any of Liu Chia Liang's films, look that damn good! One question---if anyone's seen them, what was the name of the flick with Fu Sheng, Chan Wai Man & Ti Lung? It didn't have a title in English.

I ran out of time to finish that last post, so here's the question again: Does anyone who's seen the Shaw Bros/Celestial trailers know the name of that particular trailer which featured Ku Feng,Fu Sheng,Ti Lung & Chan Wai Man (all my favorites, BTW) with a big white long hair/beard trying to fight somebody? The trailer didn't show an English translation for the title--that's why I'm asking. Anyway, thanks for the reviews,Mr. Camp---now I know what else to put on my Christmas list--keep 'em coming! :)

If I'm not mistaken, the movie you're looking for with Ku Feng,Fu Sheng,Ti Lung & Chan Wai Man is THE DEADLY BREAKING SWORD (1979). I don't know, off the top of my head, if there's a R1 release yet (I think it's on someone's list).

--Ok, Image released it last month.

Yeah, that's the film Terry. And Total Destruction has Korean connections.

DEADLY BREAKING SWORD is a good one. In addition to the cast members already cited, it's got three great Shaw Bros. actresses: Shih Szu, Lily Li and Kara Hui Ying Hung. Shih Szu has the main female role and she's especially good as a high-profile courtesan, a very different part from the spunky swordswomen she normally played.

Here's the link to my IMDB review of it:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0079148/usercomments

More Louis Cha…

THE SWIFT SWORD (1980) Dir.: Ho Meng-hua.
Cast: Wang Yu (aka Wong Yue, the one from DIRTY HO), Kara Hui Ying Hung, Niu Niu, Lily Li, Ling Yun, Lo Lieh, Chiang Tao, Dick Wei, Billy Tang. Chan Shen.

This is based on Louis Cha/Jin Yong’s THE SWORD STAINED WITH ROYAL BLOOD, which was made into a film by that name the following year (1981) and which I already wrote about here. This one follows the same broad outline but is different enough that I didn’t realize it was the same story until I looked up my notes on the earlier viewing. I had that feeling I often have with these Shaw Bros. DVDs: did I see this before? Is this a remake of something? Did they do this same scene in another movie? Jin Yong gets no credit at the beginning, at least not in English.

This is a good one. Wang Yu is no Kuo Chui but he is quite a capable performer and a credible young kung fu lead. Three major actresses appear in significant roles: Kara Hui Ying Hung, Niu Niu and Lily Li. Kara’s a fellow student of Wang Yu and she clearly likes him. But then he goes off on a mission and winds up befriending a young “scholar” (Niu Niu dressed as a male), going so far as to share a room with “him” at an inn (and freaking the scholar out when he pees in a pot in front of “him” in a funny scene) and later meeting the “boy”’s mother, Lily Li. The “scholar” reveals herself as a woman, Ningzhi, with a yen for Wang Yu also. Kara’s after Ningzhi because she stole the gold that Kara was escorting in a wagon meant for drought relief elsewhere in the region. Wang Yu has to mediate between the two. Ultimately, it’s all about a search for a treasure map once owned by a supposedly dead martial artist (father of Niu Niu) and then the search for the treasure. A weapon-laden wheelchair figures in the action. Lots of fighting, some greedy villains, a fast pace, engaging storyline, the usual classy Shaw Bros. production values.

The real draw here is the actresses. Lily Li doesn’t get to fight—she plays the role Ching Li played a year later--but the others do, especially Kara. I previously said that LONG ROAD TO GALLANTRY was Kara’s best role outside the ones she did for Lau Kar Leung. Well this one’s the second best. She gets to fight a few times here.

Niu Niu is quite amazing in the role Candy Wen Hsueh Erh played a year later. Niu Niu first impressed me as Fu Sheng’s wife in BRAVE ARCHER 2 and 3. She actually played a boy, the heroine’s younger brother, in THE SWIFT KNIGHT (1970), ten years before this one. Whether she’s dressed as a boy or a woman, she’s quite beautiful. Different from most Shaw Bros. actresses in terms of type and style, with a different way of moving and standing. Spunkier, more direct, less formal. I’m intrigued. She pretty much steals the show here.

Lots of good villains in the cast: Lo Lieh, Chiang Tao, Dick Wei, Billy Tang, Chan Shen.
Ling Yun is the martial arts hero who starts the whole thing and leaves the treasure map in a cave for Wang Yu to find.

Do I like THE SWORD STAINED WITH ROYAL BLOOD (1981) more? Yeah, mainly because of Kuo Chui, but this one’s a whole lot better than the 1993 remake.

And since I mentioned SWIFT KNIGHT, I might as well include a brief word on it, since it was in a recent viewing batch:

THE SWIFT KNIGHT 1970) Dir. Cheng Chang Ho.
Cast: Lo Lieh, Margaret Hsing Hui, Chin Han, Wang Hsieh, Fan Mei-sheng. Ouyang Shafei, Niu Niu.

Lightweight, but fun, fast, enjoyable and short—80 min. Good storyline, interesting heroes and villains. Lo Lieh is the title character, a Robin Hood/Zorro-type hero called the Swift Knight. He takes on the job of protecting a sister-and-brother pair of fugitives who happen to be the true heirs to the throne and the targets of hired swords sent by the Prince Regent’s son. The only major female character, played by Margaret Hsing Hui, is a damsel-in-distress. She falls for Lo Lieh. Her little brother, as mentioned above, is played by an actress, Niu Niu. Chin Han plays a righteous secret service guy disguised as a beggar. Fan Mei-Sheng plays a palace guard who’s disgraced and joins the good guys. Lots of action. Nothing too intricate or demanding. The score consists mostly of James Bond music cues.

Next up: THE PROUD YOUTH (1978), another Louis Cha adaptation, and THE PROUD TWINS (1979), a Ku Lung adaptation.

Thanks for the ID,everyone! The funny thing is, as many movies as I've seen with all those actors featured in it, I can't ever remember having seen this one, or if I did,it's possible I saw it under another title, but now I that I think about it--nope, I haven't. I also like anything with the underrated Shih Szu in it (the IMDB review of it was very good,BTW) so it sounds worth checking out,at least.

Yes, Kim, Shih Szu is awesome and here’s another one of her movies…

THE PROUD YOUTH (1978) dir. Sun Chung. 93 min.
Screenplay by Ni Kuang. Story by Chin Yung/aka Jin Yong, aka Louis Cha, same novel that was the basis for SWORDSMAN (1990)
Fights by Tang Chia and Huang Pei Chi.
Cast: Wang Yu (aka Wong Yue, from DIRTY HO), Shih Szu, Wang Chung, Ku Feng, Ching Miao, Ling Yun, Chan Wai Man, Tien Ching, Chan Shen.

Another Louis Cha adaptation, made earlier than the last one I wrote about (SWIFT SWORD), but also starring Wang Yu. This one was directed by the same guy who directed AVENGING EAGLE, KUNG FU INSTRUCTOR and DEADLY BREAKING SWORD. This story was also made into SWORDSMAN (1990). There were points in it where I was reminded of SWORDSMAN II, KUNG FU CULT MASTER and THE SWORD STAINED WITH ROYAL BLOOD.

The plot’s too complicated to sum up and seems as if, as in so many Louis Cha adaptations, events were cherry-picked from the original and just inserted piece by piece to make up the narrative, with explanations for certain things omitted and transitions discarded. There’s one part I want to single out, though. Early on , hero Wang Yu is given a scroll with a music transcription by two kung fu warrior-musicians bent on a suicide pact. The song is something they wrote together, “Last Song of the Empty Valley” or something. Wang Yu is told to find a musician who can play it. So he does. And it turns out to be Shih Szu and she plays it on this unusual stringed instrument (a “heptachord,” I believe the subtitle says) in a nice kind of scene that we don’t see that often in these films. And then that plot point gets dropped and it’s back to the action.

Another unusual bit comes when members of the Evil Clan barge in on Wang Yu’s Huashan Clan to offer Wang Yu a drink. So, being the obliging lad he is, he takes the drink. The rude behavior of the rest of Huashan Clan and its master send the Evil Clan members away, but not before they invite Wang Yu to join their party somewhere in the vicinity. So he goes and has a great time and there are dozens of people there, all drinking and having a good time at this big outdoors party (filmed in a studio, IIRC). How nice to see people in these films finally letting loose and having a good time. And it turns out the Evil Clan are not so evil after all.

Scenes I’ve seen before in some variation before: Wang Yu goes into a cave and finds a bunch of sword styles drawn on the walls and he learns them. (Louis Cha sure had a thing for caves.) Later they fight an enemy clan chief, Sima Wuji (played by Tien Ching), the head of the Evil Clan, who has castrated himself to master his special kung fu, a la Asia the Invincible. This fight scene reminds me of the battle finale from SWORDSMAN II.

There’s a whole subplot about Wang Yu and a young nun, whom he has saved from an attempted rape by Evil Clan swordsman and “womanizer” Chan Wai Man. Because she helped Wang Yu tend his wounds and winds up traveling back to the clan gathering with him, it causes a huge scandal. The fighting nun clan looks forward to the one we see in KUNG FU CULT MASTER.

It’s fast-paced, packed with characters and interrelationships and action, and has a good Shaw Bros. cast. There are some interesting, but unfamiliar actresses in it, including the one who plays the nun.


THE PROUD TWINS (1979) dir.: Chor Yuen. 106 min.
Cast: Fu Sheng, Candy Wen Hsueh-erh, Wu Wei-kuo, Wang Jung, Tang Ching,
Ku Kwan Chung, ang Chih Ching, Ching Miao, Jamie Luk, Chan Shen.

Based on a Ku Lung novel. Very convoluted plot about brothers separated as babies and raised by mortal enemies and then sent out as young adults to go and kill each other. But it’s fast-paced, filled with interesting characters and is a little loonier than most. Fu Sheng is very good as Xiao Yu Erh, a crafty, comical character, who’s always a step or two ahead of everybody else. Not the most confident or skilled of heroes, but he holds his own AND gets a happy ending.
Fu Sheng is raised by the wild men of Villains’ Valley and finally determines to escape, so he has to lay traps for all his “uncles.” A tiger cage is involved, with a real tiger. He sets out to find the two people he’s supposed to kill to avenge his father.

Candy Wen Hsueh-erh is dressed as boy when we first meet her, but Fu Sheng finds out she’s a girl when he has to dress her wounds while she’s unconscious. There’s a funny scene afterwards involving the question of their virginities. Fu Sheng's character loves to mess with people’s heads.
Everybody’s out to get some treasure and various fake treasure maps are in circulation.
Candy fights a lot. As does Green Fairy, a mysterious female fighter who pops up on varying sides from time to time. She’s good. Who plays her? There are a lot of interesting women in this one. Unfortunately, I don’t know who most of them are. The second lead actor, the one who plays Fu Sheng’s brother, is an interesting dude named Wu Wei-kuo, whom I’ve never heard of before. He and Fu Sheng are both looking to find and kill each other, but when they meet they feel just like, y’know, brothers.

Fu Sheng is very good in this and very funny in the kind of role that might otherwise have gone to Wang Yu, but Fu Sheng is better.

I enjoyed this one more than most of Chor Yuen’s other lesser efforts. It’s not meant to be taken too seriously. I recently saw two of Chor Yuen’s other lesser titles, both starring Ti Lung and both based on Ku Lung, PERILS OF THE SENTIMENTAL SWORDSMAN and PURSUIT OF VENGEANCE. Unfortunately, both were meant to be taken seriously. Neither was very good and I never bothered to report on them.

Hello,

Reading all these Shaw Brothers reviews in a row, I'm struck by comments on this board and others about how these movies tend to have convoluted if not haphazard plots. And then Brian's screenwriting credit for Ni Kuang on "The Proud Youth" made me ponder this matter for a bit.

To state the obvious, Ni Kuang was one of Shaws' main wuxia screenwriters who often collaborated with directors like Chor Yuen and Chang Cheh. On top of this, he's also "Wesley"--the prolific genre writer whose Wesley sci-fi novels (close to 150 of them!) are so beloved in the Sinophone world. Ni has also penned dozens of wuxia novels himself not to mention assorted detective novels, thrillers, romances, and so on. Here's the interesting bit: Ni is good friends with Jin Yong and the late Ku Lung. And he often adapted both men's works for the silver screen.

Okay, here's my question for fellow enthusiasts. To what extant were Ni's screenplay "adaptations" actually adaptations and not major re-workings or "re-imaginings" (to use Tsui Hark's word describing his two adaptations of Huanzhu Louzhu)? A cursory glance of the novels, TV serialisations, and movie adaptations will reveal major differences among the the three--usually most conspicuously in the movie version of a given story. No doubt changes occurred when filmmakers abridged multi-volume novels to fit into a single stand alone story. However, if you examine the characters and events in the Ni Kuang version of a Ku Lung or Jin Yong tale, there are significant changes in tone, plotting, and so on that cannot simply be attributed to streamlining or condensation.

BTW, there's an added layer of complexity to all of this. Sometimes when Jin Yong was out of town, Ni Kuang filled in for his friend at the _Ming Pao_ and wrote installments for whatever story Jin was writing at the time. A prolific author--accounts state that Ni can literally write between four and five thousand characters in an hour--Ni also filled in for other serialised story tellers at various times over the years. Oh yeah, and his wife is a major HK author herself who was once a leading reporter at the _Ming Pao_.

Jin Yong has often noted his dissatisfaction with the Shaw version of his stories. Meanwhile late in life, Ku Lung started a studio in Taiwan to better adapt his novels into film. Mind you, I don't think there are any sour grapes in the mix--it was Jin Yong who encouraged Ni to write the Wesley stories and in recent years, Ni has become the leading scholarly critic of Jin's novels. And there have been rumours over the years that Ni is going to write a history of the wuxia novel where, no doubt, his two friends will get major emphasis.

I guess what I'm trying to get at with this post is this: to what extant is it useful to look at these Shaw Brothers pictures as adaptations of various Ku Lung and Jin Yong stories? Would it be more productive to view them as Ni Kuang stories where he plucked various characters and scenarios from his friends' books and collaborated with a filmmaker to make something totally new but disguised in the trappings of somebody else's work? Many of these Shaw re-releases are new to me (wasn't born when they first screened) but I have read enough Jin Yong and Ku Lung (but alas not enough Ni Kuang) to know that Ni's "adaptations" of those two men's works aren't really all that faithful to the originals. The word "mash up" is actually kinda apropos here.

And to end this post on a mind twister, a lot of Chinese fans have noted that Wong Kar-wai's "Ashes of Time" is a Jin Yong "adaptation" that has been given the Ku Lung treatment, that is, given to the latter's metaphysical speculation and plotting style as opposed to the former's historicism and concern for virtue. That noted, how many of these Shaw movies are really Ni Kuang treatments where he borrowed characters and settings from his two pals' works and filtered them through his own artistic sensibility? I sort of get this impression reading Brian's detailed reviews.

Who wrote the teleplays for the TV series adaptations of these authors’ work? And were they satisfied with those?

I must confess I’ve never read either Jin Yong or Ku Lung. English translations are hard to come by. I know one or more of Jin Yong’s books have come out in English but I need to spot them in a bookstore before I’ll buy them. (Old habits…) I did spot one at a bookstore in Chinatown once upon a time and later at the Asia Society gift shop, I believe, but I wasn’t ready to spring for it either time, not yet having seen NEW TALE OF THE FLYING FOX, LITTLE DRAGON MAIDEN, ODE TO GALLANTRY, SWORD STAINED WITH ROYAL BLOOD or the BRAVE ARCHER series. Either way, I don’t think the English publications match any of the available film/TV adaptations.

Still, having seen lots of movies that Ni Kuang wrote (I counted 70 on his IMDB filmography that I’ve seen), I have to say that, issues of faithfulness aside, there are distinct differences in style, tone, plotting, characterization, etc. between the films he wrote based on Ku Lung, those based on Jin Yong and, just as importantly, those co-written with or based on ideas by the directors Chang Cheh and Lau Kar Leung. Chang Cheh takes co-writing credit on some of his films, but not Lau, who, like Chang, I suspect, was probably the one who came up with the story ideas. The scripts for the Chang Cheh Shaolin films are different from those Chang directed from Jin Yong (e.g. the BRAVE ARCHER series). The few Ku Lung adaptations Ni Kuang wrote for Chor Yuen are very different from the scripts he wrote for Chang and Lau. (And they include two of the best films in the Chor Yuen/Ku Lung cycle, THE MAGIC BLADE and CLANS OF INTRIGUE.)

I would argue that Ni Kuang was very adept at tailoring his work to the unique demands of the assignment. (Kind of like the great Hollywood screenwriter, Ben Hecht, one of the highest paid screenwriters in the Golden Age precisely because he could take any assignment and make it commercial.) If Ni Kuang was told to make a straight-ahead kung fu film with training scenes in this technique or that, then that’s what he did. If he had to make a martial world spectacular based on Ku Lung or a Beggars Clan saga based on Jin Yong, he knew how to get the flavor of their worlds without necessarily following every plot point from A-to-B-to-C, etc. He took liberties, but I’m guessing the original authors would have taken liberties if they were retelling an old story for a new publication or recasting it with Fu Sheng or Ti Lung. I’m suggesting that Ni Kuang kept the spirit of the pieces he adapted if not always the letter of it.

He also wrote the screenplays for films (WATER MARGIN, ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS, DELIGHTFUL FOREST) based on the classic work, “The Water Margin.” I’ve read that book and the adaptations seemed pretty faithful overall to me. And the world of the 108 Outlaws of Liangshan Mountain is quite a different one from that of Ku Lung and Jin Yong.

Plus he wrote CHINATOWN KID, STREET GANGS OF HONG KONG, BOXER FROM SHANTUNG, ENTER THE FAT DRAGON, THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN and INFRAMAN. Pretty versatile if you ask me. And let's not forget that he wrote an average of about twelve screenplays a year. That's one a month. Not much time for reading more than a synopsis of the source material, if you ask me.

I’d love to read “Legend of the Condor Heroes” and then compare the BRAVE ARCHER series to it.

The more I see of these films, the more I’m digging Jin Yong over Ku Lung. What’s most important to me overall is less the actual details of the stories, than the overall sense of a world being created, one that I can believe in, and of an interesting hero negotiating his way through it in a compelling manner, using hard-earned skills and principles. Jin Yong’s world, with its Beggar Clans and “Uncle Naughty” and assorted crazies, is a little earthier than Ku Lung’s more rarefied dimension of spotless pavilions and decorative boats filled with well-appointed maids and elegant ladies and chess games with life-sized living pieces. And I daresay Jin Yong’s heroes rely more on principles than Ku Lung’s. If I can use an example from American popular fiction as a contrast, the difference between Ku Lung and Jin Yong for me is like that between murder mysteries (e.g. Agatha Christie), with their attendant upper-class amateur sleuths and preponderance of clues and such, and hard-boiled crime fiction (e.g. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) where streetsmart private eyes have to contend with hoods and corrupt cops and bargain with lowlifes and shady characters to protect their clients. A writer like Hammett could dabble in both worlds (“The Thin Man” and “Red Harvest”). Just like Ni Kuang.

Hello Brian (and everyone else),

I haven't seen that many TV adaptations of Jin or Ku's works nor am I suggesting that TV shows are better simply for being more faithful to the source material. What I'm trying to get at--and you allude to this in your response--is that Ni Kuang is a major writer. He's published more novels than Jin Yong and Ku Lung combined--by a factor of five. That's not including the screenplays, non-fiction books, newspaper columns, and scholarly articles. No doubt capable of keeping his authorial voice in the background and adapting other people's works, Ni was in the unique position of being more than just a hired studio hand. A prolific writer of important standing himself, he was also good friends with two of the leading writers of wuxia fiction who could literally call up Jin or Ku and tell them how he was tackling their material while at the same time asking for suggestions (one wonders what he would have done with Liang Yusheng's novels given their strong female protagonists, eg, _Bride with White Hair_ and _Seven Swords_.)

I haven't read any Ni Kuang--not even a single Wesley novel--but looking at your synopses that describe various escapades in the films, I genuinely wonder how much of what you've recounted is actually Jin Yong/Ku Lung and not, instead, vintage Ni Kuang? The IMDB has 145 screenwriting entries for Ni and if you look at the HK Film Archive's site, he has 377 hits (some redundancies in the mix, of course.) That's a lot of stuff regardless. Ni Kuang isn't known for being a wuxia writer, but a glance at all the film titles in his resume, it's obvious he's had a major hand in shaping viewers perceptions of the genre by being the screenwriter on so many adaptations. Stripped of their martial chivalry accouterments, it seems to me that many of the Shaws films would work well as detective stories and thrillers--Ni's forte alongside the sci-fi story.

(To everybody): BTW, of note, it's Ni's sister and not his wife that is a major author/former reporter at the _Ming Pao_. Also, the major prize for science fiction writing in Chinese is named after Ni.

I find myself much preferring Ni Kuang's Shaw adaptations of Gu Long novels to his Shaw adaptations of Jin Yong (though from the very few books available in translation, Jin Yong seems to be the superior author). That said, I wonder how much of the credit for that is due to director Chu Yuan, who tackled most of the Gu Long adaptations. That said again, the one Chu Yuan adaptation of a Jin Yong novel I have seen - an adaptation of Jin Yong's The Book and the Sword resulted the weak Emperor and His Brother (my review here). The other Shaw's Jin Yong adaptations were poor also - Sword Stained was a mess, Battle Wizard and Little Dragon Maiden were enjoyable messes, Tales of a Eunuch was just awful, etc. At least Kung Fu Cult Master (not a Shaw) was fun.

Well, after all the talk about Chang Cheh and Ni Kuang and their prolific output, it’s inevitable that the next one I see with both their names on it turns out to be a complete dud.

THE WANDERING SWORDSMAN (1969) 103 min. (too long!)
Dir. Chang Cheh. Scr.: I Kuang.
Cast: David Chiang, Lily Li, Chang Pei Shan, Wong Kwong Yue, Chen Sing, Kang Hua, Cheng Lei, Wu Ma, Cliff Lok, Wang Chung, Yang Sze (Bolo Yeung).
Plus the Yuen Clan: Yuen Cheung Yan, Yuen Shun Yi, Yuen Wo Ping.
Fight directors: Yuan Chang Jen (Yuen Cheung Yan), Chen Shao Peng.

The plot has to do with a security bureau escorting a gold shipment and a band of robbers out to get them and David Chiang as a lone swordsman who gets involved. He smiles all the time and gets out of scrapes with the help of handy (offscreen) trampolines and wires that carry him all over the place. But we never quite get a handle on him. At some point he joins the bad guys and helps them out and you think he’s undercover or something but then he doesn’t lift a finger to stop the band from killing most of the good guys in one fell swoop. Huh? What’s the point? That's when the movie lost me.

Lily Li plays one of the security crew and it’s her first leading role. She has some fighting scenes, but she’s doubled and doesn’t do much. It would be several more years before Lau Kar Leung unlocked her potential in great movies like CHALLENGE OF THE MASTERS, EXECUTIONERS FROM SHAOLIN, SHAOLIN MANTIS and 8-DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER.

And there’s this whole emotional ending between David and Lily that’s totally unjustified by anything preceding it—and it goes on FOREVER! I checked the time at the point the movie should have ended and it still had around five minutes to go!

It also has some of the very worst wire work I’ve ever seen in a Hong Kong movie. I mean, David drops down from a tree branch and he dips slightly and the wires pull him UP to the next thing he has to land on, a roof or a treetop. It’s like Peter Pan (if anyone remembers the old Mary Martin musical).

Having said all that, I must say there’s a great cast on hand, with Chen Sing, Wu Ma, Cliff Lok, Yang Sze, Wang Chung, and three members of the famed Yuen Clan involved, amidst all sorts of other familiar faces. Kang Hua, the guy I liked in BLACK TAVERN, is back as a good guy again. One of the Yuen Clan was a fight choreographer on this. And there is a lot of fighting, including a good gambling hall brawl. But it's all much more gimmicky than I'm used to in a Chang Cheh film. The film suffers from David not having Ti Lung alongside him and Chang not having Lau Kar Leung do the fights.

Future director Hua Shan (INFRAMAN) is the cinematographer.

Not recommended. Considering how many movies these guys made per year, it's inevitable that some of them just got dashed off.

More Chang Cheh/Venoms action.

SHAOLIN RESCUERS (1979, aka AVENGING WARRIORS OF SHAOLIN) Dir.: Chang Cheh. 101 min.
Cast: All Five Venoms: Kuo Chui, Lo Mang, Lu Feng, Sun Chien, Chiang Sheng.
Plus: Jason Pai Piao as Hung Si Kwan. “Introducing Wang Li.”
This is one of the more enjoyable Five Venoms films. It benefits from a well-structured script that sets up the situation very well and places its characters in firm position for the mission that fate thrusts upon them. Everything happens fairly plausibly in a way we don’t often see in these films. The plot has to do with legendary Shaolin hero Hung Si Kwan (Jason Pai Piao) on the run after being seriously injured in the aftermath of the Shaolin Temple’s burning (all covered at length in earlier films). Four of the Venoms wind up having to protect him and nurse him and keep him hidden from pursuing Wudang agents sent by Pai Mei, the White Browed Priest.

One of the most interesting aspects is that four of the Venoms, the heroes of the piece, all have day jobs and three of them are actually seen working them. Kuo Chui works at a restaurant, Lo Mang at a tofu shop, and Sun Chien at a dye factory. There are several funny, clever scenes showing them practicing/competing and causing heavy damage at their places of employment. There’s good camaraderie among them. Kuo Chui and Lo Mang express a desire to escape their mundane jobs and be real heroes. We never actually see Chiang Sheng performing as an acrobat at his traveling opera troupe, even though I seem to recall such scenes when I saw this film in its English-dubbed version, AVENGING WARRIORS OF SHAOLIN, six years ago. At the end, there’s a big 15-minute fight finale where the four good Venoms and Hung Si Kwan face off against another Venom, Lu Feng and his gang at the dye factory. Good stuff all around.

The original trailer is included and it’s a very good one, pinpointing all the elements I found notable, including the story's focus on “laymen” heroes. It i.d.’s Chiang Sheng as a “Red Boat performer” and i.d.’s the man who plays Kuo Chui’s father in flashback as Huang Hsiang, a genuine “Black Tiger” kung fu expert.

MASKED AVENGERS (1981) Dir.: Chang Cheh. 87 min.
Cast: Kuo Chui, Chin Siu Ho, Chiang Sheng, Lu Feng, Wang Li.
Gimmicky late semi-Venoms Chang Cheh movie, along the lines of HOUSE OF TRAPS and FIVE ELEMENT NINJAS. Two of the Venoms are missing, replaced by Chin Siu Ho (also in HOUSE OF TRAPS and later notable in TAI CHI MASTER as Jet Li’s buddy-turned-enemy) and “honorary Venom” Wang Li.
The title characters wear gold masks with colored fake fur trim and carry gold tridents they use to kill lots of people by stabbing them in the gut. They’re hired killers although we never quite grasp who hired them or why. Chiang Sheng and his men go out to investigate and actually carry out a credible investigation into who these men are and where they’re located. Kuo Chui plays a mysterious character who has gone undercover as a cook at the inn the men stay at. He’s a suspect, but Chin Siu Ho befriends him and we eventually learn his secret. It all builds up to a big fight at the Masked Avengers’ secret headquarters with trick doors under an abandoned temple.

Entertaining, but not the most intricate or intense of these films. Lots of stabbing with tridents, sometimes running dudes through with them and then pulling them out. Lots of blood, but not the body-slicing gore you’d expect from such action. Still, you have to be able to tolerate frequent gut-stabbing action to sit through this one.

No female characters in SHAOLIN RESCUERS. One small role for a female victim of the gang in MASKED AVENGERS. Both films were staged and shot entirely on indoor studio sets.