Dance of the Drunk Mantis (1979)

Dance of the Drunk Mantis (1979)
aka Dance of the Drunken Mantis; Drunken Master Part 2: Dance of the Drunken Mantis
Chinese Title: 南北醉拳
Translation: North and South Drunken Fist

Starring: Yuen Shun-Yee, Simon Yuen Siu-Tin, Hwang Jang Lee, Linda Lin Ying, Corey Yuen Kwai, Yen Shi-Kwan, Dean Shek
Director: Yuen Woo-Ping
Action Directors: Yuen Shun-Yee, Brandy Yuen, Chin Yuet-Sang, Corey Yuen

 

I’m not sure if Drunken Master is the first film to feature the drunken fist style. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t. I can’t help but wonder if it ever showed up in the 100+ Wong Fei-Hung films that Kwan Tak-Hing made back in 1950s and 1960s, or in some obscure mid-70s kung fu film. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case. Of course, we can credit Jackie Chan’s landmark film with popularizing the style, which makes a huge difference. And with a film as popular as Drunken Master, I think it’s only logical that the filmmakers at Seasonal Films would get it in their minds to make a sequel.

Casting Jackie, however, was probably out of the question for the studio. After all, Jackie had merely been on loan to them from Lo Wei when he made the Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow/Drunken Master double-feature and Jackie was now hot property. Seasonal Films didn’t want to get involved with whatever dirty work that getting Jackie to switch studios would have entailed—as it turned out, it would entail Jimmy “the” Wang Yu acting as mediator between Jackie and Lo Wei’s triad buddies. As such, it was probably easier (and cheaper) to build a film around Drunken Master’s other star, Simon Yuen Siu-Tin.

The resulting film was essentially a remake of Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. In order for that to work, writer/producer Ng See-Yuen took two assumptions from the previous film and turned them on their heads. The first is that Beggar So/Sam Seed was the most powerful fighter in the land. After all, in the first film, the King of Sticks was afraid to fight him until he realized that Sam Seed wasn’t drunk. Moreover, when Sam Seed showed up at the final battle, Thunderfoot was anxious to get him out of there for fear that he’d have to fight the old beggar. To get past that, Ng See-Yuen simply expanded the universe, so that the aforementioned “land” was only Southern China, meaning that there were kung fu masters just as powerful living in the North. Enter the villain: Rubber Legs (Hwang Jang Lee).

The other assumption that Ng See-Yuen snuck around was that drunken fist boxing was the most powerful style around. We learn here that such isn’t the case. For one, Rubber Legs is the most powerful fighter in the North not because he uses drunken boxing, but because he’s been able to merge it with other styles. But just as Ng expanded the background setting from Southern China to all ofChina, he also expands to the background of the drunken fist style itself. No longer is it a powerful style in itself, but a subsystem in an entire family of styles—it’s sort of the reckless prodigal younger brother of the family. As bizarre as the uninitiated might think drunken boxing is, it’s pretty normal compared to the wacky styles that the film’s protagonist will learn in the last act.

Let’s see: main character (Yuen Shun-Yee) who’s a put-upon orphan (although Yuen Shun-Yee’s Foggy is at least adopted here)? Powerful kung fu master of a Southern style who’s being hunted by an even more powerful master of a Northern style? Protagonist who’ll have to learn a new style because his first master’s technique isn’t enough to defeat the villain? Yup, sounds like a reworking of Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow to me.

We kick off the film with the introduction of a Sam Seed impersonator (Brandy Yuen, one of the film’s choreographers and probable stunt double for his dad) being mistaken for the real deal by Rubber Legs and his student (Corey Yuen, Righting Wrongs and Fong Sai Yuk II). While impersonating Sam Seed may be great for scoring oneself some free wine, it does very little to protect the impersonator from the student’s Eagle claw technique and the false drunkard is sent to meet his maker. I should point out here that the Eagle Claw used by Corey Yuen in this sequence is the actual ying jow pai (Northern Eagle Claw) and not the three-fingered Southern variation that usually shows up in films.

We then meet our protagonist Foggy, who’s just been fired from the restaurant he worked at for beating up a couple of unruly patrons. He meets his adopted father, Sam Seed (although neither of them are aware of the fact at the moment), when he tries to prevent him from beating up a con artist who made his girlfriend act pregnant in order to extort money from the old beggar. Since the con artists get away, that can only mean a nice beating for Foggy at the hands of the drunken master himself.

The next character we meet is Sam Seed’s wife (Linda Lin Ying, who played a different role in Drunken Master), who’s busy beating up a loan shark (Chin Yuet-Sang, another of the film’s action directors) with her hyper-flexible kicks. Sam Seed shows up at home shortly thereafter, only to get into a fight—with fisticuffs, not words–with his wife over his prolonged absence. Evidently our drunken hero isn’t so heroic after all and never sent his wife a red cent while he was out wandering aroundSouthern China. Foggy shows up and we learn that Sam’s wife had adopted the boy while her husband was out and about. Sam Seed is less than pleased about the situation, since he considers the boy to be an idiot.

As it turns out, Sam Seed isn’t quite the deadbeat bastard his wife thinks he is; he actually did send her money, the bank simply neglected to pass it along to her. So, Sam Seed and Foggy take a trip to the bank to find out what happened. Cue the long “comic” sequence involving Dean Shek (The Fearless Hyena and A Better Tomorrow II). Shek shows up as the unscrupulous bank owner, who not only kept Sam’s money for himself, but apparently worships some mythical Chinese entity known in the English dub as “The Great Scrooge,” which makes him feel as if giving refunds is beneath him. Banker Shek should’ve watched the first film, especially the sequence involving Iron Head Rat, to see just how well Sam Seed takes to swindlers. By the end of the fight, Sam Seed has taken every gold article (bracelets, chains, rings, teeth) that Banker Shek had on his person.

Up to this point, the movie has done a fairly solid job of portraying Sam Seed as being the lovable old kung fu rogue that he was in the last film, who just happens to have a wife whom he routinely neglects in order to wander around and beat people up. He’s still likable guy, albeit with a few character flaws. That part of his character is seriously undermined in the next scenes in which he finds himself compelled to teach Foggy kung fu. While his methods are just as tortuous as they were for Freddy Wong/Wong Fei-Hung in the first film, Sam Seed spends the bulk of the training berating and verbally abusing his adopted son. It really transforms the character from a drunken boxing teddy bear to a miserable old goat.

The underlying problem here is that we’re dealing with different character archetypes here. Sam Seed came across as being so endearing in Drunken Master because his pupil, Jackie Chan’s Freddy Wong, was something of a prick. He was lovable prick, but a prick nonetheless. He needed Sam Seed to humble him and put him in his place. Freddy Wong deserved a fair amount of the abuse inflicted on him and it ultimately made him into a better fighter, if not a better person. When you have a protagonist in a kung fu comedy who’s an arrogant boob, the master should been in the Sam Seed mold in order to give the guy what’s coming to him. That’s how it goes.

Foggy, however, doesn’t belong to the Freddy Wong “lovable jerk” archetype. He’s more in line with Jackie Chan’s character from Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, the poor orphan who doesn’t know kung fu. That sort of character needs a more empathetic kung fu teacher, not Sam Seed. The fact that Sam Seed treats him probably worse than he treated Jackie Chan’s character in The Drunken Master makes him a very unsympathetic character for most of the film’s second act.

The movie gets back onto surer footing with the big showdown between Sam Seed and Rubber Legs almost an hour into the film. What begins as what looks like a meeting of two old drinking buddies quickly grows intense the two trade blows while doing otherwise innocent things like exchange cups of wine or try to down shots. It doesn’t take long before any pretext of friendly drinking is thrown out the window and Sam Seed is giving Rubber Legs a firsthand demonstration of the “Eight Drunk Gods” technique. All is well for Sam Seed until Rubber Legs switches styles from drunken boxing to the drunken mantis, which his opponent is totally unprepared for (note that whenever Rubber Legs starts revving up his drunken mantis technique, a snippet from Goblin’s score to Suspiria is played in the background). Sam Seed gets a taste of his own medicine and it’s only through Foggy’s intervention that he survives to tell the tale.

We now enter the obligatory training sequence of the film. While fetching some herbs for his adopted dad, Foggy happens upon a cottage out in the middle of nowhere whose sole inhabitant is a sickly fellow who lives in a coffin (Yen Shi-Kwan, 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles and The Master Strikes). The guy turns out to be not only a powerful kung fu master, but he’s Sam Seed’s brother as well. This is where get a bit of background on drunken boxing (at least in the film’s universe). You see, drunken boxing is actually only a sub-style of a family of kung fu styles, which includes the book style, the magic style, and the sickness style. Apparently Sam Seed had championed the drunken fist technique to the detriment of the others, which inevitably left the door open for Rubber Legs to defeat him. After a couple of friendly duels, the sick master agrees to train Foggy in the other three sub-styles.

Amusingly enough, Dance of the Drunk Mantis has even more fight action than Drunken Master had, fitting 14 different fights (minus the training sequences) into its 94-minute running time. Its predecessor, on the other hand, had 13 fights during its 110-minute duration. Like Drunken Master, this film is able to create a separate identity for most of its fights, incorporating different styles, actors, and objects into each individual scuffle. For example, in his first fight, Corey Yuen uses the Northern Eagle Claw style. In his second fight, he uses drunken boxing. Finally, he wields a spear in his final dual with Linda Lin and Yuen Shun-Yee. Likewise, Linda Lin uses her wondrous legwork in her first two fights and then a two-edged straight sword in her last fight. That last part should be expected; after this film she made a career out of training non-martial artist actresses in swordplay for roles in wuxia movies.

One point that Dance of the Drunk Mantis has over the previous film is that there’s more drunken fighting on display than in the previous film. The first film waited for the last half hour to really show us any drunken boxing. Not only do we get some drunken boxing courtesy of Simon Yuen (and his stunt double), but there’s a nice, brief drunken duel between Yuen Shun-Yee and Corey Yuen in the middle of the film. Moreover, Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee also gets to bust out both drunken boxing and drunken mantis, which helps the action a lot.

Yuen Shun-Yee acquits himself well enough in one of his few major hero roles. His physical talent is undeniable; he performs kung fu and acrobatics with the same level of aplomb that Jackie Chan made a career of doing. He handles physical comedy well, especially when transforming pulse-taking and knee reflexes into powerful kung fu. His only drawback is that he lacks Jackie Chan’s natural charisma. He’s not a personality vacuum or anything, but he lacks the innate charm that allowed Jackie to be likable, even when playing arrogant or prankster characters. He came off better later on playing the villains in films like Dreadnaught and Shaolin Drunkard.

Hwang Jang Lee comes pretty close to stealing the show as Rubber Legs. Despite the name, Hwang’s legendary superkicking is toned down in favor of more intricate handwork. He’s just as versatile as ever, however, and he convinces with both his drunken boxing and his mantis techniques, despite the fact that he never formally trained in either of them. He does get to perform a few good jumping kicks, including one where he locks his opponent’s head with his leg, jumps high into the air, and then performs a back kick on the guy.

I’m less inclined to complain about this film being something of a remake of Yuen’s earlier film because it’s not only well done, but because it was simply a product of the times. Yuen Woo-Ping would later direct a few other films that add substantially to the kung fu comedy sub-genre, so I can live with him copying himself once or twice (he also directed The Magnificent Butcher that year, which was closer in spirit to Drunken Master). The movie does lose some points for its less-than-sympathetic portrayal of Sam Seed, and I think that a few of the fights, especially the early ones with Linda Lin, lacked some of the energy of Drunken Master’s fights. That said, it’s still a very good kung fu comedy and one of the better examples out there of a film following the Seasonal Formula, as it is a movie about such an iconic style of kung fu.