The Kid with the Golden Arm I liked a lot.
Hey I was going to feature that one on my next mega-post! You sir are sneakier than Iron Feet himself! And twice as trecherous!
Yeah I thought it was really fun too. A classical Shaw Brothers production.
There were some funny lines in this one. "You were hit by the Sand Palm strike. That's one of the three most poisonous palm strikes in the world!"
Like, seriously, one of the three most poisonous plam strikes in the world? Just the fact that there are more than one seems funny to me. Let alone that there are three which are so instantly recognizable and well-known.
Or when it's revealed that they've dug a freaking tunnel under the room where they store the gold. The floor just suddenly caves in and the bandits are off to steal it. It's so hilariously outlandish.
Or Copper Heads death. He salutes and then just collapses.
He was probably the most dignified drunken master I can think of. Usually they are so buffoonish but he mostly just acted wry and somewhat rude. More rougish than anything. Rather refreshing I must say.
and even the Seven Hooks gang, although those guys were rather indistinct.
Well they were basically mooks for the slaughter.
I feel like in this movie they just wanted to create a bunch of characters
... and have them fight each other. Yeah a whole chunk of the entire genre can be boiled down to that desire.
Also watched Heroes of the East.
While I like
Heroes of the East, I rank it fairly low in comparison to what are popularly considered other all-time Hong Kong greats like
One-Armed Swordsman or
Invincible Pole Arm Fighter.
I guess this is kind of contradicted by him being able to beat all these supposed masters, but whatever.
I think the idea behind this lies in something those old masters at the dojo said. They talked about how Japan only has one style for each of their various disciplines while China has a great multitude of them. The versatility and ingenuity of Chinese martial arts enabled him to win -- since he could tailor-make himself for each situation. He wasn't the best unarmed fighter around -- but the drunken master style was so confusing that the karate guy didn't know what to do. The nunchaku could never win due to the lenght of the three-section staff. And so on.
Most unique about this film was that it avoided demonizing the Japanese. They definitely poked fun at them, and I guess Ninjutsu was demonized to an extent. That being said, as far as I know poison and other devious tactics have for a long time been considered dishonorable in wuxia mythology, not because of any anti-Japanese feeling. His wife even told him "You don't know it's history"
In this movie multiple Japanese styles and weapons were treated respectfully...even if it did sort of imply at the end that Chinese are more moralistic than Japanese,
I would be a bit more harsh on the movie than you. Yeah with these sort of flicks the demonization of the Japanese can be really outlandish (my favorite is in
One-Armed Boxer where the Japanese are
literally vampires<45>). Normally they are potrayed as the worst of bullies. But the moralistic slant is really thorough in this film. All the Japanese masters are implicitly okay with underhanded and devious methods to win -- and they are presented as narrow-minded and militaristic, both in their martial arts and their way of life (one mirroing the other). Worst may be the judoka who just crashes Gordon's crib and demands a duel at midnight. Yeah there is this theme of co-existance and respecting ones cultural differences, but with the heavy moral slant that sort of falls by the wayside. I mean, the whole theme is pretty mitigated when you're simultaniously saying "my culture > your culture."
But yeah, considering what else is out there, I suppose it was progressive.
Duel to the Death from 1983 would be another film that has a more respectable attitude towards the Japanese -- though even there it's somewhat slanted.
The whole "damn young people" angle from the two fathers was pretty interesting to get too.
It also presented a positive image of a Japanese/Chinese marriage.
I actually really liked those early drama scenes. So he marries this beautiful Japanese babe and the very next morning she's casually karate-kicking his entire backyard asunder, acting totally nonchalant about it as well.
That's just hilarious to me -- and my greatest nightmare at the same time. Their love-hate rivalry from there on was really funny. It's a tad sad that she falls by the wayside once the duels start.
And finally, Ninjutsu has got to be my least favorite style I've seen presented in any of these films. What a ugly style. Disguises, traps, running and hiding in the water? Booooo. So fucking lame. It worked well here as the final boss fight, but I'm not in any hurry to watch any Ninja centered movies.
Yeah, one of my problems with Heroes of the East is really that they start with the most interesting battle and from then-on it's a steady slope downwards, hitting the nadir with the ninjutsu battle. The whole "crab style" hullabaloo was downright eye-rolling, especially when contrasted with the early kinetic stuff like the sword duel or the spear match.
Now I might as well talk about the second Chang Cheh film I was going to write about in the mega-post, I watched
Masked Avengers from 1981. It was really good! A bit more uneven than
Kid with the Golden Arm but still a classy Shaw Brothers picture.
I really liked the cultish aspects of the villains. They weren't just a band of brigands or assassins, they had strange rites and rituals of their own, alien customs to which every member of their order had to give himself. The fight scenes where just awesome too. They made good work of those tridents. That ending where every leader of the Masked Avengers are lowered onto the ground one-by-oned was definitively like something out of a 90's beat-em' up game.
But Jesus... I had no idea who anyone was in this film!<45> I know that is sort of a semi-regular criticism of chopsake films, especially from westerners, but this picture was downright head-scratching! Almost no-one gets a proper character introduction and literally everyone has the same hairstyle on display. And it's an ensamble piece where you're never tied down to one character.
This film was freakishly grim though. The Masked Avengers are just slaughtering everyone! They hold blood-drinking rituals, violate maidens en-masse, torture and maim their captives, and impale anyone they see with their blasted tridents. I've never seen so many people get penetrated with poles outside a porno! But since the drama is so pedestrian and we known almost none of the characters it feels strangly toothless. Or maybe not toothless... you definitively get this quirky sensation that this is some grim shit going on. But since you almost never have any emotions for the characters it all feels strangly disconnected. The expection obviously being that jokester whom befriends the waiter.
