Return to the 36th Chamber (1980)

Return to the 36th Chamber (1980)
aka: Return of the Master Killer
Chinese Title: 少林搭棚大師
Translation: Shaolin Scaffolding Master

 

Starring: Gordon Liu Chia-Hui, Kara Hui Ying-Hung, Hsiao Ho, Wa Lun, King Lee King-Chu, Kwan Yung-Moon, Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, Chiang Tao, Chang Yi-Tao
Director: Lau Kar-Leung
Action Director: Lau Kar-Leung, Hsiao Ho, King Lee King-Chiu

 

The 36 Chambers of Shaolin was a box office success and catapulted actor Gordon Liu to stardom. It took Lau Kar-Leung two years to work his way around to a sequel, being involved with numerous other projects in the meantime. By the time he started making Return to the 36^th Chamber, it was obvious that the pressure was on him to lighten up the proceedings. Kung fu comedies were the Big Thing at the time, and Jackie Chan was making lots of money for Golden Harvest by this point. And so we get a slightly goofier follow-up to the more serious-minded classic, which manages to avoid an actual body count, much like Lau Kar-Leung’s masterpiece Heroes of the East.

The film is set an unspecified number of years after the events of the first 36 Chambers movie. The local dye factory, owned by Boss Wang (Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, of Lady is the Boss and My Young Auntie) and ran by the brutal Chief Ma (Chiang Tao, of Executioners of Shaolin), is having some quality control issues. So, they bring some Manchurian overseers to keep the workers in line. And to pay the new employees, Boss Wang has Ma deduct 20% of the workers’ salary. When the workers, led by Chou Shisheng (Oily Maniac’s Wa Lun), try to go on strike, the Manchu supervisors (played by Korean actors Kwang Yung-Moon and Chang Yi-Tao) beat them up and intimidate them into continuing their work.

In order to get their wages back, Hsiao Hung (Kara Hui-Ying Hung) and Ah Chao (Hsiao Ho), come up with an idea: Chou Shisheng’s brother, Chun Chi (Gordon Liu), is a conman who dresses up like a monk in order to make a few bucks through donations. They have him imitate the infamous monk San Te (the same character Liu played in the last film) with the intention of scaring the Chief Ma and his supervisors into restoring their original salary. I mean, nobody is going to want to challenge a famous Shaolin monk to a fight, right? Well, what they did not count on was Boss Wang having the balls to do so. He unmasks Chou Chun Chi’s trickery and sends him packing. Humiliated, Chou Chun Chi high tails it out of town and heads for Shaolin, where he can learn real kung fu from the real San Te (Lee King-Chiu, who assisted with the film’s fight choreography).

Return to the 36^th Chamber suffers from some strange pacing issues. The movie runs a little longer than ninety minutes, almost twenty minutes shorter than its predecessor does. While not a problem in itself, it suffers from an overlong second act and a truncated third act. The second act, which sees Chun Chi going to Shaolin, suffers from internal pacing issues of its own. Almost thirty minutes of that section of the movie is devoted to Chun Chi’s harebrained schemes to get into the Shaolin Temple (he is initially rejected as a student) and his first exercise routine: throwing a rock into a well and using the splash to wash his wig—a long story in itself. Only after that is Chou allowed to stay at the temple, with the caveat that instead of learning kung fu, he has to build bamboo scaffolding for temple renovations. But by then, nearly an hour of the movie has passed. Before you know it, three years of labor has gone by within ten minutes of running time!

While we get to see numerous exercises performed by the laymen studying under San Te’s tutelage, Gordon Liu’s character does not really pass through what would be the “complete” training sequence. His initial task does indeed build up strength, stamina and agility, but his scaffolding “training” is built almost entirely on coincidence. The movie fails to tell—or show us—if he was instructed to use more acrobatic means to carry out his job, or if he figured out on his own that doing so would make him more productive. While he frequently does sluff on the labor to mimic his colleagues’ kung fu movements, it is unclear just how much his on-the-sly training contributes to his explosive demonstration of skill prior to leaving the temple. The movie hints that San Te intentionally placed Chun Chi on scaffolding duty to teach him the esoteric style of Scaffolding Fu, but his lack of oversight means that Gordon Liu ended up picking up those skills merely by chance.

The fights in the first act are played mainly for laughs. The action only gets serious in the last fifteen minutes when Chou Chun Chi, discovering that he has learned kung fu, challenges Boss Wang and his supervisors to a series of duels. The first half of the climax is a miracle of elaborate fight choreography, as Gordon Liu has to weave in and out multiple opponents’ attacks—including Kwan Yung Moon’s superior kicking—while neutralizing them with sharpened bamboo cords, to which his own body has long developed a resistance. Chang Yi Tao, who showed up in Clones of Bruce Lee and Enter Three Dragons under the moniker Bruce Lai, was also a great kicker, although his skills do not get the same showcase that Kwan Yung Moon’s do.

In the second half of the final fight, Gordon Liu throws down with Johnny Wang Lung Wei and his bodyguards, who have their special sawhorse, of bench, style of kung fu, complete with collapsible sawhorses! Gordon Liu’s conventional kung fu is not good enough for multiple opponents wielding wooden benches, so he leads them to a construction site, which is more to his liking. After all, construction sites in the 18^th century had bamboo scaffolding…just the right thing to supercharge his technique.

As good as said fight is, it does suffer from the Gymkata Syndrome, in which the character’s full fighting potential is dependent on external factors that are not always available. For Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas, he needed an environment that contained objects resembling gymnastics apparati. In Gordon Liu’s case, he fights best in, on and around bamboo scaffolding. Seems kind of limiting, doesn’t it? Considering how thoughtful Lau Kar-Leung’s martial meditations were in his earlier films, including Clan of the White Lotus, it feels odd to build a film around a fictitious style as universally ineffective as Gordon Liu’s Scaffolding-Fu. Lau Kar-Leung worked better with real styles and their real-world applications; he should have left the made-up ones to Jackie Chan and  Yuen Woo-Ping, whose natural creativity was better suited for those.