A Book of Heroes (1986)

A Book of Heroes (1986)
Chinese Title: 歡樂龍虎榜
Translation: Happy Dragon Tiger List

 

Starring: Pauline Lan Shin-Mei, Yukari Oshima, Elsa Yeung, Hu Gua, David Tao, Yasuaki Kurata, Eugene Thomas, Fong Ching, Siu Ban-Ban, Chan Wai-Lau
Director: Kevin Chu Yen-Ping
Action Director: Lam Man-Cheung

 

Chinese cinema, by which I mean films coming out of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China, has given the world some of my favorite sub-genres of action film. There’s the old school kung fu movie, which needs no introduction. There’s the wuxia pian, that crazy genre filled with people fighting with swords, esoteric styles, and striving for control of the so-called “Martial World.” Love or hate it, the wire-fu film, a close cousin of wuxia pian, gave us some of the most creative fights ever. There’s also the bullet ballet, which turned gunplay into a bloody, ultraviolent art form.

Finally, there’s the 80s stunt-based action film. You know the movie: the heroes, usually cops, always found themselves in situations where they’d have to beat up scores of villains, usually drug dealers, who for reasons unknown preferred to cavort around without firearms. Said fights included awesomely-choreographed fisticuffs, found objects being used as weapons, and of course, people being thrown through furniture in the most painfully-looking ways possible. It’s the sort of film that Hong Kong filmmakers have all but stopped making, leaving countries likeThailandandIndonesiato pick up the slack.

One of the classes of this sub-genre was the Girls n’ Guns film. Girls n’ Guns movies have their roots in 1970s kung fu movies, which featured no-nonsense women like Angela Mao, Polly Shang Kuan Ling Feng and Judy Lee beating the living snot out of scores of kung fu baddies, often without the help of their male counterparts. Let me state here that few things in this world are a beautiful as Angela Mao kicking someone in the head. The Girls n’ Guns film simply took these sorts of women and placed them in a modern setting and gave them firearms, even though they almost always ended up kick-boxing the bad guys, usually triads and drug dealers, into submission. And that’s the way things should be.

Interestingly enough, it hasn’t been until recently that Hollywood has really picked up on the idea of a**-kicking women. Hollywoodhas always had a hard time with that aspect of action cinema. There was Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson back in the 1970s, but they could only do so much for the genre. Years later, James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver showed Hollywoodhow to do it right in Aliens. Even so, on the whole, American cinema has been pretty slow in giving us the femme fatale action we all need in our lives. And even when they do, they almost inevitably make the mistake of over-sexualizing the actresses, turning them into beautiful butt-kicking sex objects instead of confident butt-kicking women.

The thing is, for a long time, the women in Chinese action movies were often just as sexy, if not more so, than their Hollywood counterparts and they rarely were decked out in so much tight black leather that they became a kung fu S&M fantasy or had so much cleavage on display that they’d suffer a wardrobe malfunction performing anything more complicated than a front kick (obviously, there are exceptions, like the naked Alice Tseng sword fight from Ninja: The Final Duel or the Pink Ranger fighting Billy Chow in the buff in Escape from the Brothel).Hong Kong filmmakers seemed to have understood that confident, attractive women beating the stew out of anyone who opposes them is a sexy feat in itself. Unfortunately, the people in Hollywood missed that particular memo, and so a good portion of the independent women in action movies from this hemisphere come across as more akin to a young adult male fantasy than a real female character.

The Girls n’ Guns film took root in 1985 with the release of Yes, Madam! Directed by up-and-coming director (and veteran fight choreographer) Corey Yuen, the film introduced the world to the martial talents of some American actress named Cynthia Rothrock and an ex-ballerina named Michelle Yeoh. The movie was a pretty decent action-comedy until the last 10 minutes, when the two women storm the villain’s mansion, leading to one of the greatest fight scenes ever filmed, bar none. It was followed about six sequels, three of which have been reviewed here.

A Book of Heroes was made in 1986, when the genre was still young. That year saw the release of Yes, Madam!’s first sequel, Royal Warriors and a few other loose odds and ends in the female action movie genre, such as the sublimely silly Magic Crystal. The effects of Yes, Madam! can be readily seen here, as both films mix bone-crunching action and goofy comedy, culminating in a climatic fight in the villain’s mansion. Despite this film’s derivative nature, it’s actually better than its inspiration in some ways, as it deposits way more confidence in its female leads than Yes, Madam! did. Corey Yuen seemed a bit afraid to let Michelle and Cynthia really cut loose until the finale, whereas director Kevin Chu Yen-Ping (yes, the Fantasy Mission Force guy), lets all three actresses pile on the hurt in the opening scenes.

The movie opens with a gang of men armed with AK-47s robbing a gold shipment at a pier. A team of cops led by the inept Hu Pai (Hu Gua, The Funny Family) try to stop the crooks, but are repelled by the gang’s superior firepower. There’s a mildly humorous scene where Hu Pai chases after them on a bicycle, only to turn and run when the bad guys open fire on him. He rides away so fast that he ends up entering a local bike race and taking first prize(!). That sort of goofy humor defines the sort of sight gag we’ll be treated to for the rest of the movie.

We switch to a random bar, where a woman named Hsinmei (Pauline Lan, Myth of a City and Funny Family) is involved in some betting game that involves drinking mugs of beer and sticking coins into a glass of wine, all done with the song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” playing in the background. After collecting her wins, she notices a drug deal going involving one of the robbers from the previous scene. Soon a fight breaks out between her and the crook in which she goes about throwing the poor sucker through anything that breaks. That sets the tones for the rest of the action scenes in the film; if you were to play a drinking game in which you downed a shot every time someone is thrown through a pane of glass, a chair, a window, a shelf, a wall, a door, or something similar, you’d be in alcoholic coma by the end of the first set piece. More people show up to fight Hsinmei, including a mysterious Japanese girl (Yukari Oshima, Once Upon a Time in Manila and Outlaw Brothers). Hsinmei is arrested after it’s learned that she’s not really a cop, even though she’s always impersonating one.

It turns out that Hsinmei is Hu Pai’s girlfriend. Between Hsinmei’s antics and Hu Pai’s failure to catch the gold crooks in the first scene, Hu Pai soon finds himself relegated to traffic duty. Meanwhile, the employer of the gold thieves, a certain Oshima Yamashita (Yasuaki Kurata, A Girl Called Tigress and So Close), is interested in hiring Yukari (I don’t think she’s ever named in the film). She accepts and he establishes her salary in the following manner: she has to kill the gold thieves and for each member of the gang she kills, her salary will go up. She does with great aplomb in one of the film’s best fights.

One of the thieves gets away and is found by Hsinmei and Hu Pai. They find out that he’s sent a map to the gold to his sister, a con artist by the name of Yang Shanshan (Elsa Yeung, Challenge of the Lady Ninja and Pink Force Commando). We meet Shanshan at a bachelor’s club, which she gets into by bribing the bouncer, a tiny little kid (Siu Ban-Ban, Magic Crystal) with considerable kung fu skills. She ends up trumping a bunch of white guys in poker, one of whom is dubbed to sound like a Mandarin-speaking Barney Rubble. Of course, nobody likes to lose at poker, especially to a woman who’s trespassing at a men’s club. So Barney Rubble calls for help, which comes in the form of a dozen men armed with knives. I find it hugely amusing that the employees of a men’s club just happen to be going about their shifts with machetes on their person. A huge fight breaks out between Shanshan and the knife-wielding assailants, although the little kid (and his stunt double) helps the lady out.

It doesn’t take long for both Yamashita and the cops, represented by Hu Pai and (sort of) Hsinmei, to set their sights on Shanshan. As it turns out, she already has the map and soon she and her lover, David (David Tao, Fantasy Mission Force and Crippled Kung Fu Boxer), are on the lam. They stop at a gas station where they meet its loser owner, Ah Fang (Fong Ching, Ghost Bustin’ and The Vampire Dominator). Ah Fang quickly falls for Shanshan, much to David’s dismay. Yamashita’s men show up at the gas station and another fight breaks out that ends with Shanshan bringing the house down before Yamashita’s men blow the place up. Shanshan and David (and later Ah Fang) are captured and taken to Yamashita’s mansion.

This leads to an amusing comic sequence where Shanshan and David have a heart-to-heart, thinking that they’re going to die. After trading touching declarations, Shanshan confesses that she once took more than her share during a certain job. David is okay with it, confessing that he once took more than his fair share during another job. Shanshan tenderly confesses that she was aware of it, which is why she gave him a laxative. David lovingly tells her that he knew she had given him a laxative, which is why he put the blame for the robbery on her and had her arrested. He goes to tell her that he had an affair with the maid while she was in jail. Needless to say, Shanshan isn’t going to be very happy about that particular revelation.

Shanshan, David, and Ah Fang are released from the mansion after Hu Pai and Hsinmei show up. It’s at that moment that Shanshan figures out the secret of the map and finds the gold. It goes without saying that Yamashita’s goons are going to be in hot pursuit, and soon finds herself back at his mansion. But when she goes so far as to offer herself to Yamashita himself, I think we can agree that she’s has something a little different in mind than getting shtupped by a filthy-rich criminal. Perhaps she’s buying herself time until the final fight can break out?

A Book of Heroes is a pretty good example of the sort of action film that Chinese filmmakers excelled at during the 1980s (and early 1990s). The story takes a back seat to violent stunt-based action that’ll make most people wince and goofy comedy that makes the action look all the more jarring. Here we have multiple parties trying to get a hold of a cache of gold, which is ultimately unimportant, since everybody who’s watching this movie in this day and age is in it for the fights. The gold is essentially a MacGuffin needed to get things moving. But we won’t hold it against this film.

The comedy is silly, but rarely offensive. I’ve mentioned some of the comic set pieces already. Some of the sight gags involve a car being pulled by a pair of water buffalo and Fong Ching defeating Yamashita’s flunkies with a well-placed cactus during the final fight. There’s some language-based humor, the best one being the dialogue exchanged between Hu Pai and Hsinmei while they’re fighting Yamashita’s main goon (Eugene Thomas, the infamous Black Monk of Harlem himself). The two set up a strategy, only for Thomas to react before they do. They soon figure out that Thomas speaks Mandarin. So they switch to Taiwanese, which apparently Thomas understands, too. Finally, they start speaking Hakka, which Thomas doesn’t know, and are able to beat him.

It’s during the same fight that Kevin Chu Yen-Ping decides to include some racist humor, which may turn some off. At one point, Hsinmei curses Eugene Thomas, calling him “Black Bamboo.” Hu Pai then corrects her, telling her that the correct expression is “Black Baboon.” It wasn’t really needed, and it makes me curious to know what Eugene Thomas thought of being subject to that sort of humor. As he kept on making movies inTaiwanafter this, I can only imagine that he was just used to it. I also wonder if that was the actual joke in Mandarin, or if the people making the subtitles figured that would be the closest equivalent.

Bad racist jokes and silly, forgettable plots aside, the film’s main drawing card is obviously the action. Once again, frequent Chu Yen-Ping collaborator Lam Man-Cheung is charged with handling the choreography, which he does. Extremely. Well. If you ask me, Mr. Lam is easily the best action director that Taiwanever saw. Ponto final. He’s basically the Taiwanese Sammo Hung in terms of modern action choreography in terms of displaying the players’ skills, making non-martial artists look good, and even in overusing post-filming slow motion. Lam Man-Cheung did the choreography for most of the Kung Fu Kids series, which Chu Yen-Ping produced and/or directed. I’ve pointed out before that the sixth film in that series has some of the best action of the 1980s. Apparently having the Kung Fu Kids films on his résumé paid off, because Lam was brought in to work on The Three Ninjas Knuckle Up during the 1990s. Lam Man-Cheung also worked on the superlative The Death Games and Dark City, both of which have some of the best martial arts action to be seen in the second half of the 1990s, afterHong Kong cinema started sucking.

Helping things is the film’s cast, four of whom are seasoned screen fighters. The biggest revelation of the cast is Pauline Lan, who comes across as a Taiwanese version of Moon Lee. Her fighting skills are absolutely stunning; her signature move is a jumping roundhouse kick that goes over her opponent’s head, after which she performs a jumping front kick or spinning kick with the other leg. She does it at least three times during the movie and it’s breathtaking each time she pulls it off. It’s really a shame that Lan only made about four movies, two of which appear to not have any martial arts at all.

Joining Pauline Lan is genre veteran Elsa Yeung, who’d been in the business since the 1970s. She has the least flashy moves of the three leads, but gets the most fight action in the film. Her main quirk is to stop in the middle of a fight and check her make-up or brush her hair. She also gets one of the most random moments in the finale, when she ducks behind a couch and suddenly reappears with a golf club, whacking her assailants through doors and tables. However, Elsa Yeung probably is the best actress of the three, as she’s required to be flirtatious, melodramatic, conniving, and all-around manipulative and pulls it off fairly solidly. Pauline Lan and Yukari Oshima, on the other hand, play the goofy and straight kung fu bad-a**ses, respectively.

Finally there’s Yukari Oshima in one of her earliest film appearances. Her role amounts to little more of an extended cameo, but she gets no less than four fight scenes, all of which are simply terrific. Apparently she was trained in acrobatics in addition to goju-ryu karate (the same style I trained in back in the day), because her specialty is to perform a jumping spin kick and then land in some unique position, like the splits or in a push-up position. I don’t think any of the movies she worked on after this ever came this close to showcasing her kicking skills as well as this film does, which are on the level of Yuen Biao at his very best. Her character is very one-note—she puts on her usual nearly-androgynous tough girl persona–but she does get to lighten up a bit at the end for the film’s warming-down fight…yes, there’s a warming-down fight in this. In any case, this movie makes me want to watch more of Yukari’s contributions to the genre. Besides this, the only other Yukari films I’ve seen are Angel, Millionaire’s Express, and Outlaw Brothers. If any of you have any Yukari Oshima films to recommend, please let me know.

The only other notable fighters here are Eugene Thomas and the legendary Yasuaki Kurata. I don’t think Kurata ever gave a bad performance during his entire career and even in his sixties, the man doesn’t seem to know when to quit. Earlier this year (or late last year) I saw the trailer for some Japanese supernatural police thriller and there Kurata was, brandishing a katana like the old days, including this film. I love that man. I’m far less acquainted with Thomas’s work, except that he was based out ofTaiwanduring the 1980s and spent most of his career working alongside Alexander Lo Rei, aka the Taiwanese Michael Dudikoff. That’s right, Thomas was something of a expert of dealing with those pesky ninja foolish enough to pull their shenanigans in ol’Formosa. He’s a good martial artist and it shows here, although he doesn’t get to anything really flashy beyond taking on two combatants simultaneously.

I’d like to think that this is the last movie associated with Kevin Chu Yen-PingI’ll ever review, although I know that something will drag me back into the director’s twisted world later on. I mean, he directed the Chinese Nazi trilogy and this, one of the best Girls n’ Guns films of them all. Isn’t that enough? Do I really need to review the Kung Fu Kids films or those Shaolin Popey films from the 1990s that feature kids running around with elephant masks on their genitals? I suppose I’ll have to sit down and write a review of the wonderfully over-the-top Butterfly and Sword at some point, although I’ll probably pass on its sister film, the softcore porn Slave of the Sword. Same goes for Lady in Heat…and Naughty Boys and Soldiers…and You and Me and a Girl Named Ugly…not to mention Kung Fu Dunk. Just stick with the films of his I’ve already reviewed and nobody gets hurt.