The Bride with White Hair (1993)

The Bride with White Hair (1993) Aka: Jiang-Hu, Between Love and Glory Chinese Title: 白髮魔女傳 Translation: The Legend of the White-Haired Demoness

Starring: Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Francis Ng, Elaine Lui, Law Lok-Lam, Bao Fang, Eddy Ko Hung, Joseph Cheng King-Kei

Director: Ronnie Yu

Action Director: Phillip Kwok

When it comes to contemporary (i.e., 20th century to the present) wuxia authors, there is apparently a trifecta of important authors: Gu Long, Jin Yong, and Liang Yusheng. There are two other important ones, in my esteem: Wong Ying and Wang Dulu. Gu Long’s ginormous bibliography essentially defined Shaw Brothers director Chor Yuen’s career during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Jin Yong needs no introduction: he wrote a handful of humongous novels which have been adapted to film and TV and continue to be until this very day (see Donnie Yen’s Sakra and Tsui Hark’s Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants).

Wong Ying did a number of novels that were adapted to film by the Shaw Brothers, like Web of Death; The Bastard Swordsman; Portrait in Crystal; and Bat Without Wings. He also did a number of screenplays and story treatments for film, like Encounter of the Spooky Kind; The Loot; The Sword; and Opium and the Kung Fu Master. Sadly, he died in 1991 at age 35. Wang Dulu is best known for his Crane-Iron quintet of novels, of which Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is book #4. 

That brings us to Liang Yusheng, whose works place him alongside Gu Long and Jin Yong. Liang is credited with starting the “new school” of wuxia writing with serial publication of his novel Longhu Dou Jinghua, which was based on a famous public match between a White Crane and a Tai Chi master at the time. He ended up publishing some 35 novels during his lifetime, the most famous of which are Mount Heaven series, from which we got both Bride with White Hair (book 1) and Seven Swords (book 3).

The movie opens in the earliest days of the Qing Dynasty, around 1654 A.D. The Qing Emperor is dying and has sent four his generals to search for a mystical flower said to bloom once every 20 years. The flower is said to have curative properties and the Emperor wants to extend his life just a little more. The generals learn that the flower is being guarded by Wudan swordsman Cho Yi-Hang (Leslie Cheung), who refuses to give up the flower. He kills the generals and then starts narrating his story. (This bit is covered at the beginning of Legend of the White Hair Brides, a Singaporean series from 1996 that adapted Book 2 in the series: Sawai Qixia Zhuan).

Cho Yi-Hang is an orphan who was raised by the head of the Wudang Sect, Tzu Yang (Bao Fang, of Blood-Stained Tradewinds and Heroes Among Heroes). Cho Yi-Hang is the most talented swordsman among the clan’s children, although his own personal code of morals clashes with the more prudish ideals of the sect. This is especially true with the Wudan Clan’s second-in-command, Pai Yun (Law Lok-Lam, of Ten Tigers of Shaolin and Dragon Strikes), who does all he can to discredit Yi-Hang. His reason? He wants to install his daughter, Ho Lu-Hua (who’ll be played as an adult by Yammie Lam, of Witch from Nepal), as the next leader of Wudan. 

One evening, Cho Yi-Hang is out saving a goat from one of the local farms from a pack of wolves when he finds himself surrounded by said canines. He is rescued by a young woman playing a flute, whom we’ll discover later is Lien, the film’s Wolf Devil Woman (if you will).

Years pass and Cho Yi-Hang grows into a righteous young man, although he is aloof from the politics of the Eight Clans and the ambition of the taking over Wudan. At the time, the Ming Dynasty is in its death throes: the Qings are making inroads into the Northeast and General Wu San-Kuei (Eddie Ko Hung, probably playing a character based on Li Tzu-Cheng) is getting ready to rebel and take over the Ming Dynasty from within. But the Wudan has more pressing issues at the moment:

We witness a massacre of peasants by the Ming army on account of their stealing food from the palace. The soldiers are in turn slaughtered by Lien (now played by Brigitte Lin, of Swordsman II and Ashes of Time), who is now a powerful martial artist. Lien is in the employ of the Magic Cult (that’s how the subs on my DVD refer to her), which is led by a Siamese-twin duo (Exiled’s Francis Ng and Angel’s Elaine Lui) who had been kicked out of Wudan some 20 years earlier for practicing black magic. The Magic Clan wants to destroy the Eight Clans and sends Lien to do their dirty work; Wudan wants to destroy the duo, collectively named Chi Wu-Shuang, and put an end to the Magic Cult. 

But then Cho Yi-Hang and Lien meet and fall in love. But as their clans are destined to destroy each other, this forbidden love can only result in tragedy…

In a short “Making Of” video on my DVD, Ronnie Yu and his producer commented that Liang Yusheng’s writing style gets very deep into the characters’ emotions, which they wanted to portray onscreen. As a result, the film is a lot less about the story proper—the subplot involving Wu San-Kuei is handled offscreen more than it is handled onscreen—and more about the love of the two main characters, the ambitions of Wudan, and the male-half of Chi Wu-Shuang pining over Lien. Thank goodness for this approach, they got some great actors (Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Francis Ng) for the job. Leslie Cheung could play this sort of role in his sleep: passionate, but flawed and aloof. Brigitte Lin can go from giddy-young-girl-in-love to violent wuxia murderess in 0,5 seconds flat, having already honed the latter in the Swordsman sequels. The only liability among the actors is Elaine Lui, who does so much cackling over her brother’s unrequited love for Lien that she becomes irritating after a while.

If I were to be glib about this, I would say that The Bride With White Hair is Kung Fu Cult Master, but with more sex and nudity (including a brief glimpse of Elaine Lui). The visual approach is very similar. The fights seemed to have been filmed by fiddling (or mis-timing) with the camera’s shudder and then undercranking the footage (or shooting at a slower speed). It gives the action a blurry, sped-up, jerky effect that makes the fights look like “human stop-motion animation,” which is trippy. This is similar to a lot of the action in Kung Fu Cult Master, although that used more overcranking for a slow-motion blur effect. That film also brings up the Eight Clans, although Shaolin is nowhere to be seen in TBWWH. 

Instead of going to China to film, Ronnie Yu and his team stayed in Hong Kong and built all the sets. This gives the film a very theatrical feel, which actually works for what is an intimate story set to the backdrop of more sprawling historical events (i.e., the entire fall of the Ming Dynasty). You might say that this movie strives for a Neo-Shaw Brothers stage look, which makes for a great counterpoint with films like New Dragon Inn and Ashes of Time, which were both filmed in the deserts of Western China. From a visual standpoint, I really like the film.

The action was staged by Phillip Kwok, who had also worked on wuxia movies at the time like Zen of Sword and Handsome Siblings. The action is pure fantasy wire-fu, with scenes of Lien pulling people in half with her bullwhip or slicing people up with super-long strands of her white hair in the end. There is some actual swordplay, but don’t expect a whole lot. This is all about the wire-work. Chi Wu-Shuang’s skills are ascribed to magic, so he can kill people simply by screaming at them and can essentially perform telekinesis. The fight scenes are also a bit short and there are no classic wuxia moments here, like what one might find in Kung Fu Cult Master or Butterfly and Sword. But for the purpose of the story and visual aesthetic, the action generally works.

Some reviews focus on the more erotic aspects of the film, which are there, although I think they are overstated. There is some nudity from a random dancer at a meeting of the Magic Cult and we briefly see Elaine Lui’s breast when we learn that her and her brother are Siamese twins. Leslie Cheung and Brigitte Lin’s big sex scene is torrid and passionate, but also no more revealing than Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen’s scenes in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. So if you tune into this hoping to see Brigitte Boos, you’ll probably be disappointed. But if you want a wuxia movie in which every frame can be framed as a painting--the fight scenes are Impressionist, the sex scenes Rococco, other scenes being Baroque—then you should enjoy The Bride with White Hair.

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025)

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025)

Starring: Ana de Armas, Angelica Houston, Gabriel Byrne, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ava Joyce McCarthy, Norman Reedus, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, with Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Keanu Reeves
Director: Len Wiseman
Action Director: Caleb Spillyards, Jeremy Marinas, Anis Cheurfa

We have been getting female-centric movies about lady assassins, sleeper agents, and what have you for the past decade or so. From Anna to Red Sparrow to Gunpowder Milkshake to Protégé to...you get the point. There are a lot of them. Most of them are decent entertainment at best, although Kate was good because it felt unrestrained in its action and violence compared to most of its peers. Amidst all of these films and the gleeful lack of restraint of the John Wick films, it was an exciting endeavor to learn about Ballerina. The premise was elementary: John Wick 3 established that Angelica Houston's The Director ran a Russian ballet school in NYC that served as a front for training female assassins. Okay, so the writers just needed to create a character from that school whose story they could tell...with lots of action. I think we got even more excited when Ana de Armas was hired, considering that I've read a lot of reviews suggesting that her scenes in No Time to Die were the best in the movie. I'm not sure how we reacted to Len Wiseman being brought on as director: the Underworld films have more than its fair share of fans--the fact that all five films went to theaters is almost harder to believe than the fact that all six Resident Evil films did--but he hadn't done much of note since then. But with Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski working as producers, I'm sure they would help make sure he did the franchise justice.

And he did.

For the most part.

The movie opens with an attack on a large house by a bunch of a masked gunmen led by a man we'll later know as The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, of The End of Days and The Keep). Their target is a man, Javier (David Castañeda, of Sicario: Day of the Soldado), and his daughter, Eve. What little we gleam from their limited conversation while the bullets are flying is that Javier used to be party of The Chancellor's organization and left, prompting the latter to murder his wife. The Chancellor wants Eve, but Javier refuses to give her up. Lots of gunshots and explosions later, the man is dead and Eve is now an orphan. She is found at the police station by Winston (a returning Ian McShane), who offers to give her direction: that is, take her to the Ruska Roma to study under the tutelage of The Director. Eve accepts and begins her training, both as a ballerina and an assassin. Whereas John Wick was the Baba Yaga (the Slavic boogieman), the assassins of the Ruska Roma are known as Kikimora, another Slavic spirit that prey on lazy people (but who may be beneficial to kind-hearted people). I would like for every John Wick Universe film to make some obscure folklore reference to the killer in question ("Caine is an incarnation of War Deity Jiutian Xuannü, except that he has a penis").

Twelve years later, Eve has grown up and is completing her studies in ballet, martial arts, and gunplay. After a chance meeting with John Wick (this scene is set parallel to John Wick 3), she decides she is ready to start taking on work. After a handful of successful jobs, she is attacked while leaving a nightclub by an unknown assailant. She manages to kill him, only to notice that the tattoo on his wrist is the same as the gunmen from the beginning. This is where we start learning about their identity: they are a Death Cult that work outside of the jurisdiction of the High Table. They kill people for business and for sport--the motivations of the attack on Eve outside the club go unexplained, so I wonder if they were just following random killers--the John Wick Universe suggests that half the population of NYC are killers-for-hire--and attacked her when convenient. Eve goes to see Winston who warns her to stay way from the Cult, but realizing how determined she is, points her in the direction of a member who happens to be staying at the Prague branch of the Continental.

Eve flies to Prague against the wishes of the Director and checks in at the Continental. There she learns that the guest is fleeing from the Cult with his young daughter, Ella (Ava Joyce McCarthy). What Eve doesn't realize is that almost everybody in the lobby of the Continental either works for the Cult (headed by Lena, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno) or is waiting for them to up the bounty enough that they'd be willing to break Continental rules and kill the guy. All hell breaks loose in the Continental and the girl ends up getting kidnapped. Eve eventually learns that they are hiding out in the mountains of eastern Austria (or western Hungary) and heads out there in search of the Chancellor...

Like most of the other John Wick films, this movie has lots of ideas that it doesn't explore very much because it needs to get to the next action set piece. We learn a little bit more about how the Ruska Roma functions, which straddles the line between outright cruelty and surprising mercy. I also like how the film sets us up for this maudlin tale of an assassin traveling with a little girl and discovering her humanity through her interaction with her...only to subvert that by having the girl get immediately captured and Eve focus on the administering of death to her foes. No forced emotions and audience manipulation here, people!

The Death Cult is a neat idea, especially when we learn that it is a community of former assassins and mercenaries who a) have embraced their killer heritage and b) wanted to settle down and have families. There are scattered images throughout the scenes there that suggest the assassin philosophy is ingrained in children from a very young age. That means that when Eve reaches her destination, she'll literally have an entire city trying to kill her. Sadly, the film fails to address the moral implications of what exactly it means for Eve to kill so many people in those last 40 minutes or so.

Speaking of killing, the movie has the requisite number of set pieces that you would expect from a John Wick movie. The main fight choreographer is Caleb Spillyards, who has done a lot of stuntwork on both Marvel and DC films. Most recently, he choreographed the fight scenes to Thunderbolts*. He is joined by Jeremy Marinas (The Beekeeper) and Anis Cheurfa, another veteran of numerous superhero films and the earlier John Wick movies. The fight sequences and gun-fu set pieces are of the general standard set by the other JW movies. The movie establishes early on that men are naturally physically superior to Eve, so she'll have to learn how to cheat and fight dirty. What that means is that she has to use a lot more weapons--pipes, knives, axes (which reminds me of the Hitman 3 game), ice skates, etc.--then straight-up fisticuffs. Even though I'm not a stickler to it like many mainstream movie critics these days are, I'm glad that the film brought up that point. There is your requisite judo and jiu-jitsu, and even some Taekwondo from a group of Korean gangsters in Eve's first job.

There are two big gimmick-y action sequences, which we have come to expect from these movies at least since John Wick 3. The first one is what I can only describe as "close-quarters combat with hand grenades." People who cannot suspend disbelief will surely call shenanigans on this scene, especially since Eve walks away with very little damage to her body. Then there is the climax, which is a huge gunfight...but with DUELING FLAMETHROWERS. We haven't seen this much carnage and awesomeness involving flamethrowers since Aliens. John Wick also shows up right before the climax and gets to have a one-on-one judo fight with Ana de Armas. Any damage he does to her is surely payback for whatever torture she inflicted on him in Knock Knock.

I need to watch Kate again, but as far as I'm concerned, this is the best Hollywood femme fatale action-opus since things kicked off with Salt. I enjoyed this quite a bit and am looking forward to the next spin-off: Caine.

Jailbreak (2017)

Jailbreak (2017)

Starring: Jean-Paul Ly, Dara Our, Celine Tran, Tharoth Sam, Dara Phang, Tiger Reth, Sok Visal, Laurent Plancel

Director: Jimmy Henderson

Action Director: Jean-Paul Ly, Dara Our

Jailbreak was an inevitability. Southeast Asia got the spotlight in 2003 when Tony Jaa, Panna Rittikrai, and Prachya Pinkaew gave us Ong Bak and reminded the world that a back-to-basics martial arts/stuntwork thriller in the vintage Jackie Chan mold. A few years later, Vietnam joined suit with The Rebel, starring Johnny Tri Nguyen (who had had a small villain role in said trio’s Tom Yung Goong / The Protector) and Veronica Ngo (who has gone on to work in Hollywood). The year after that, Malaysia tried its hand at martial arts filmmaking with Four Dragons, which sadly sucked. Then Welsh director Gareth Evans went to Indonesia and made history alongside Iko Uwais with Merantau, followed by the world-famous The Raid duology. So, it was only a matter a time before other countries like Cambodia would get in on the action. 

(OBS: A brief look at the IMDB shows that Laos and Myanmar might have their own martial arts films, but I can’t find any information about them)

Jailbreak is the product of Italian-English filmmaker Jimmy Henderson and English writer Michael Hodgson, both of whom relocated from Europe to Cambodia to work in film. Both men are active to this day, with their last film being The Last Ritual, a horror movie from 2024. The script is pretty simple: it is basically The Raid, but in a prison. I find it interesting we often define films as “[X movie], but —" The most famous example is with Die Hard: “Under Siege is Die Hard on a boat”; “Passenger 57 is Die Hard on an airplane”; “Project Shadowchaser is Die Hard with a cyborg”; “City Hunter is Die Hard, but with Jackie Chan in drag”; etc. So, “The Raid, but—” refers to an action movie in which a small number of protagonists trapped in a finite area, usually a building, with a large number of villains.

The premise is exceedingly simple. The only male member of the infamous Butterfly Gang has been arrested and has promised to the authorities that he will reveal the identity of it female leader: Madame Butterfly (former porn actress Céline Tran). Of course, Madame Butterfly cannot have this, so she has her army of female assassins try to knock him off. A group of Cambodian SWAT team members, including Dara (Dara Our, of Hanuman), Sucheat (Dara Phang, of Killing Time Violently), and a female officer, Tharoth (Tharoth Sam, of The Lockdown). Joining them is a French agent of Asian extraction, Jean-Paul (Jean-Paul Ly, of Nightshooters), who has been assigned to the Butterfly Gang case. 

The Butterfly Gang’s initial attempts to murder their own member fail and the our heroes are able to get the guy to the prison. But some of the female assassins show up at the prison and convince one of the harder inmates, Bolo (Sisowath Siriwudd, of Hex), to kill the guy. Him and another prison inmate who works in the infirmary (Tiger Reth?) are able to kill some guards and break loose. They make more confusion by releasing the entirety of their prison gang, the Scorpions, into the prison. So, now the three Cambodians and Jean-Paul have a small army of criminals to fight through in order to save the Butterfly Gang member. But he is able to evade capture by releasing both the entire Gecko Gang (the rival prison gang) and the prison’s most dangerous criminals: Cannibal (Eh Phoutong, also of Hanuman) and Suicide (Laurent Plancel, a French martial artist working as a Hollywood stuntman). So, will our heroes (and the one competent prison guard who is with them) have enough energy to fight off an entire army of inmates in order to secure the witness? And what about when Madame Butterfly and her assassins decide to get personally involved.

So yeah, Jailbreak is basically The Raid by way of Death Warrant…or Half Past Dead. Or just “The Raid, but in a jail.” Whatever. The premise is simple and mainly exists to set up one fight sequence after the other. Gareth Evans was talented enough to break up the brutal martial arts segments with moments of suspense, like Iko Uwais hiding behind the television or the SWAT team holing up in a room before trying to break through the floor and get out via the next floor down. There is no character development, except for a brief moment of romantic tension between Jean-Paul and Tharoth. There are three groups of villains, although the film does the scant script a disservice by establishing that the Butterfly Gang’s female assassins have entered the prison at one point, but not have any of them fight (except for Céline Tran herself). In fact, two seconds after the girls arrive at the prison, the film forgets that the underling chicks are even a thing.

The fights were staged by Jean-Paul Ly and Dara Our, the film’s main stars. Jean-Paul Ly is actually a half-Chinese, half-Cambodian martial artist whose background includes a multitude of styles: Hapkido, Karate, Capoeira, and “tricking” (or parkour).  Ly had been working as a stuntman in Hollywood and the UK for a few years when Jimmy Henderson invited him to star in this. Dara Our is trained in Bokator, a traditional Cambodian martial art. Early on in the film, we see Dara training with one of his fellow officers and Jean-Paul asks him if he’s using Muay Thai. He responds that he’s using Bokator, which is interesting, because Cambodian does have its own iteration of Muay Thai, known as Kun Khmer, or Pradal Serey. Technically, Kun Khmer is derived from Bokator, which is an older and more varied warrior art and whose curriculum included hand-to-hand combat, wrestling, and weapons.

There is a lot of fighting. My favorite fight is early on when Jean-Paul is accosted by a group of prisoners in the prison restroom, which quickly escalates into a huge group melee in the showers. This is earlier in the film, so our heroes all still have their night sticks (or tonfa) to fight with and I love a good tonfa fight. There is a big fight between Dara, Sucheat, the prison guard, and the Gecko gang, which gets surprisingly brutal at the end (given that Sucheat is portrayed as a coward who just wants to run to safety). Jean-Paul gets to fight against Suicide in a nicely-choreographed one-on-one that might’ve been my favorite fight had Ly’s comeback hadn’t been so rushed. Meanwhile, Dara takes on The Cannibal in a one of those “fighter verus mountain of muscle” fights that is more vicious than technique-driven. The climax consists of three individual one-on-one’s: Jean-Paul vs. Bolo; Dara vs. the high-kicking infirmary prisoner; and finally Tharoth vs. Madame Butterfly, in a brutal fight involving fisticuffs and a katana. 

As a successor to the Raid films and Southeast Asian MA cinema in general, Jailbreak does its job nicely on a pure choreography basis. It does not reinvent the wheel, but it does represent Cambodian martial arts in a way that brings to mind Thai and Indonesian films, even if the film on the whole is a lot less polished than those countries’ efforts. I don’t think any of the final fights reach the level of that first group scuffle, but it’s solid all around. It is a good start, and a much better one that that crappy Four Dragons. I hope that they can do more of that, although it has been 8 years now, so I don’t know.