by ·Comments Off on SPL: Kill Zone (2005, Wilson Yip)

I think the movie wants us to root for the cops who are trying to out-brutality each other, versus drug boss Sammo Hung who had the parents of a “cute” child murdered before they could testify against him. I chose to wish righteous death upon everyone onscreen, and nearly got my wish. Each cop has his little emotional family subplot before getting killed by a white-suited knife guy, except for retiring-due-to-brain-cancer Simon Yam who unfairly gets to live to see the sequel. Sammo also survives, but has been through a lot (accidentally murdering his family using Donnie Yen as a weapon), so he’s allowed to skip the sequel. The lighting was good, anyway.

Look what happens to bad cops:

My coworkers are always asking the autocomplete apps for professional advice and they no longer trust any knowledge that doesn’t come from bots, so I finally gave in, asking a bot how this movie ends, and it gave a completely wrong answer. Brandon’s Deeper Into Movies Blog: providing more accurate movie descriptions than the autocomplete bots for almost twenty years.

You have defeated Donnie Yen, but at what cost?

by ·Comments Off on Project A (1983, Jackie Chan)

There’s a lotta plot here, but Jackie ends up working for his bar-brawl rival Yuen Biao (Rat/Weasel of Eastern Condors) and teaming up with gangster-gambler Sammo to fight corruption and then take on pirates. After a dumbass white admiral gets captured by dread pirate Lo (Dick Wei of Visa to Hell), Chan’s ex-coast-guarders go rogue, beat the shit out of a pirate collaborator to figure out how to contact them, and smuggle Sammo aboard in a barrel. When Chan goes through some gears then hangs from a clock tower, it’s hard to miss the classic silent comedy references, and since this is the week for great bicycle scenes, we get a chase where he beats up guys with a bike in ten different ways.

Jackie was just in Locarno:

I think back to when we made those films, and we had so many problems [on the set]. It would be raining terribly. Something serious not working. On Project A, we got seasick, the [scenes of the] pirates on the sea were so difficult to do… but we kept going, and no matter what, we finished the movie. Then when it came out it was a success, and 40 years later people are still watching it. That’s what I signed up for. You see so many movies, so many directors – and nobody remembers them today. But then a few movies, 100 years later, are still there. At some point, I said to myself: I want to make this kind of movie, no matter how difficult it will be. When I pass away, I want the next generations to say there’s Bruce Lee, there’s Chaplin, there’s Jackie Chan.

by ·Comments Off on Eastern Condors (1987, Sammo Hung)

Chinese prisoners are dropped into Vietnam days after the US pulled out of the war to destroy a weapons cache before it falls into enemy hands. Kind of a Dirty Dozen plot, but these guys are not soldiers, and the first one dies tragicomically because he doesn’t open his parachute in time due to a stutter when counting to twenty. But the USA was counting on the idea that all Chinese people know kung fu (true), and that losing comrades one at a time over the course of an arduous Vietnam mission in a 1980’s movie will turn one of them into Rambo, and this happens to Sammo, who completes the mission. By the end he’s killing people using tree leaves as missile weapons – it’s acting like a serious war movie, the action scenes short and brutal (and sometimes astounding), but with the kinds of moves you’d expect from a parody.

Thin-mustached colonel in charge is Lam Ching-Ying of Mr. Vampire and all the Bruce Lee movies. Yuen Woo-Ping is Mouse (loses his legs during a machine gun bridge crossing) and Original Foon Yuen Biao is Weasel, but various translations refer to both men as Rat, so overall the cast is hard to figure out. The commando girl who sticks with them is Joyce Godenzi (the future Mrs. Sammo Hung), and the evil giggling general (Criterion: “like a eunuch villain from a King Hu film transported to the present”) is Yuen Wah of Kung Fu Hustle.

The movie’s final words still resonate today:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997, Sammo Hung)

Cheesy, stupid movie whenever anyone is talking, but it’s also the most handsome-looking one of these movies in a while, and Jet Li is back, and his and Clubfoot’s action scenes are hot. The action is chopped up more than usual, but it works, until it doesn’t. Music is hit or miss – playing the OUATIC theme on Western instruments is cool but sometimes the composer plays a choir on a sampling keyboard, which is less cool. Wong loses his memory on a trip to America, joins a native tribe and hooks up with Agent Tammy Preston (in her only acting role outside of Twin Peaks). Sammo sure is trying some things to revive the series, sometimes successfully, but goes too broad and ends up with anti-racism for babies, nowhere near the heights of his Millionaire’s Express.

Our guys are joined by Billy (stuntman Jeff Wolfe), far right:

by ·Comments Off on Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024, Soi Cheang)

I think the notes I took while watching this can stand on their own:

Girl Fishball’s prost mom gets beaten to death
He’s trying to save up for a fake ID but gets into gambling with the boys
Music is too big but maybe that’s the 1980s setting
This is 1986?

Raymond is the “employed cop” (?) of Detective vs. Sleuths
Cyclone’s doctor is looking for dead Jim’s son to kill his whole family
Chau is the doc, Lui killed his family, Jim was Lui’s killer who seems modeled after Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of NY
Jim is Koo’s Throw Down costar

Boss Tiger lost an eye to Jim, Boss Chau his family, and Cyclone killed Jim
Cyclone was secret friends with Jim and smuggled his family out of town after killing
Our guy is Jim’s son, whitehair doc Chau is pissed
They spent a billion dollars recreating the neighborhood for this film, but needed these guys to play different ages in the 1960s and 1980s and threw some talcum in their hair
Gravity-defying fights, not going for realism despite the kowloon recreation

AV is guy with underwear mask
It uses the godzilla (??)
They all butcher each other while Lok is incapacitated
Some of the goofiest action moves since Dragon Inn
Almost everyone is dead and the cops have Lok

Sammo’s sunglasses guy King uses this fight to move in and take over
King kills his boss Sammo after killing Cyclone
King’s deal is that he is physically indestructible
The action is too choppy, but decently cool
I saw a lady for a few seconds, must have been a mistake

by ·Comments Off on Painted Skin (1992, King Hu)

I’m no King Hu expert, but his final film feels flabby and dated, not so much a late masterpiece. Horny Wong (Adam Cheng, played twins in Zu Warriors) falls for hot Joey Wong (the year before she was White Snake) who is actually a gross ghost wearing a human mask while trying to escape from the limbo-cult she’s been trapped in. The energy decidedly picks up when monk Sammo Hung takes up her cause in the last half hour.

by ·Comments Off on Blade of Fury (1993, Sammo Hung)

Due to my copy’s wonky subtitles and my general lack of historical context and, uh, my inability to pay close attention to plots and alliances in movies, I dunno what exactly happened, but I know they all died heroically in the end, for the future of China.

The Big Sword lays waste to the Japanese:

Wang Wu (Yang Fan) is our main furious swordsman, getting his entire Big Sword troop killed by the Japanese in the opening scenes. He meets young masters Ti Lung (A Better Tomorrow) and Cynthia Khan (star of a Yes Madam sequel/ripoff the same year), they team up with some government guys who are trying to “reform” the government (sword-involved reform).

Our Boy Sammo:

Plenty of wire jumps and trampolines, swordfights and beheadings, people getting shot in the face, Sammo over/under-cranking every action scene. Clearly made in the wake of the Once Upon a Time movies, with its mix of action and historical politics – and from the writer of parts II and III, and with a small role for Rosamund Kwan as a rich lady who thinks Wang is quite nice. Sammo gives himself one fight playing a prison guard – it’s great, but all the fights are great. Not sure where James Tien appeared – one of the camel riding raiders? – but this movie notably has the same ending as his Fist of Fury, which I should’ve seen coming from the title.

Nefarious Ngo (Master Wong’s dad in OUATIC3) loses to The Big Sword:

by ·Comments Off on The Magnificent Butcher (1979, Yuen Woo-ping)

Time for another Sammo Hung movie. This time he’s a butcher, introduced slipping on a banana peel, but the butcher job barely matters – mainly he’s a disciple of Wong Fei-Hung (Kwan Tak-Hing, who’d been playing Wong since the 1940s), innocently helping start a war with another school run by Lee Hoi-Sang (a fighter in Game of Death II). One of the rival school’s guys is evil Ko (Fung Hak-On of Police Story) who has kidnapped Sammo’s little brother’s wife. Meanwhile, a weird beggar gets some chickens drunk, turns out to be drunken master Fan Mei-Sheng (of The One-Armed Swordsman) with an interest in solving the kidnapping. Allies and rivalries get all mixed up, and there’s more crazy plot stuff and some brutal deaths, but we have come to watch great fighting performed with unusual weapons (I just saw the Ko fan fighter as the master in Encounters of the Spooky Kind II) against ludicrous villains (Mad Dog from Yes, Madam! appears here without the mustache as “Weird Cat”).

The brother and the drunken master:

Guess who:

by ·Comments Off on Encounters of the Spooky Kind II (1989, Ricky Lau)

Hey, about a month ago we hit our 4000th post, big congrats to us! That drum roll means we’ve got a winner. If you’re the fifth reader, or any reader at all, welcome to my top ten. I’d like to thank our sponsor, but we haven’t got a sponsor. Not if you were the last blog on earth.

Sammo Hung and his girl flee from her wicked brother into a spooky coffin house, where they’re menaced by a hopping vampire who just wants to smoke opium with them. You hire Ricky Lau after he’s made four consecutive Mr. Vampire movies, you get hopping vampires. This turns out to be Sammo’s dream, and in waking life the brother is friendly Little Hoi (Aspirin thief of Yes, Madam!). But all is not fine and dandy, since the girl’s rednosed dad is angry after Sammo fights an impertinent teahouse customer who uses mad monkey kung fu via his magician buddy. Sammo needs cash to make things right in order to marry Mimi Kung (Chow Yun-Fat’s wife in Office) but ends up getting tangled in ghost drama.

Master, Sammo, Little Hoi:

Not a continuation of the first Encounter from a decade earlier, but why did I write that it was my first Sammo Hung movie when I’d written about at least two others previously? Ghost Hung (Wong Man-Gwan of Prison on Fire) tries to help steal vases from Teahouse Sze (Andrew Lam of Sammo’s problematic Pantyhose Hero), but Sammo’s master Lam Ching-Ying (also the Mr. Vampire master) doesn’t like him hanging around ghosts and attacks her with his yin-yang yo-yo pokeball. This should all be leading up to a master magicians duel like in the first movie, but when it arrives they’re not even in the same space, a psychic battle across town, which is less immediately satisfying than the first movie’s courtyard tower firefight. Sammo spends some time with his soul in a pig. There’s a really unconvincing swordfight against menacing dogs. Kung-fu with explosive gas-filled mummies is more like it. Movie ends on a dick-sucking joke, perfect.

Sze, Evil Master, monkey: