The Guy with the Secret Kung Fu (1981)

The Guy with the Secret Kung Fu (1981)
Chinese Title: 採陽女幫主
Translation: Pick Yang Female Gang Leader

 

Starring: Meng Fei, Li Chung Chien, Nancy Yen, Sally Chan, Elsa Yeung, Shut Chun-Tin, Cheng Fu-Hung
Director: Joe Law
Action Directors: Chen Mu Chuan, Sun Chi, Huang Chih Wei

While not really a zombie film per se, I chose Guy with Secret Kung Fu as one of my choices for Nate Shumate’s Month of the Living Dead on account of its Portuguese title, Zumbis do Kung Fu. There is a zombie in the film, although it isn’t the film’s focus. Nonetheless, films with kung fu and zombies are not always easy to come by, especially here in Brazil. So you take what you can get your hands on. This film, for example, is in the Public Domain, and thus I was able to download for free off the Cult of UHF website (thanks Reverend for posting it!). Here in Brazil, the most readily-available martial arts films are those in the Public Domain, Jackie Chan movies, and Shaw Bros films, although I suspect that pirating made short work of most of the companies that distributed these films. As a result, a lot of the other horror/comedy/kung fu hybrid films that Hong Kong is so well-known for aren’t available. I suppose I could’ve rented House of the Dead or one of the Resident Evil films, but really, who’d want to? So here I am with another low budget Taiwanese martial arts film that turns out to be not as bad as I was expecting it to be.

The setting of the film is the early Qing Dynasty (circ. 1644): The Qings have just taken over and are now oppressing the Chinese people to no end. Fortunately, there are a number of revolutionaries out, fighting the Qing and trying to free the Han Chinese from the iron fist of the Manchu emperor, Kung Tzu. Two of the said revolutionaries are the great folk heroes, Hung Wen Ting (Meng Fei, King Boxer) and Hu Yang-Pao (Li Chung Chien, Invincible Kung Fu Trio), are on the run from government assassins, who kill two of their compatriots (plus the mother of one of them) before the opening credits.

Just a quick observation, there was a real life kung fu fighter named Hong Wen-Ting (Hung Man-Ting). He was the son of Hong Xiguan (Hung Hey-Kwun), the founder of the hung gar style and a famous anti-Qing patriot. I wonder if Meng Fei is portraying the same, since the fighting styles and the time period match about right.

We meet our two heroes as they are fishing in a river. While Hung is trying to catch a crab, they hear a girl screaming: she and her old father are being attacked by a bunch of would-be rapists who are rowing upstream. Hung and Hu come to their rescue, and beat the thugs into submission. The thugs turn out to be members of the Dragon Gang, a gang of evil people whom the government suspects may be trying to overthrow the emperor. The leader is a woman, whom we’ll call the Dragon mistress (Sally Chen, Dream of the Red Chamber). She chastises her men for getting beat up and orders them to kill the two interlopers.

Shortly after the initial encounter, the Dragon Gang sees Hu, who is walking through the city. They set up an ambush for him, complete with bombs and flaming carts. Although he is able to escape, he ends up bumping into a provincial judge while running through the street. The judge orders his arrest, and Hu is able to fend for himself until the judge takes a woman hostage, after which Hu turns himself in.

Hung finds out about his friend’s capture and decides to rescue him. He does so by breaking up the procession of guards on the way to the jail, which he is able to do by dropping his money on the ground and making it look like an accident. While all the guards are trying to help him pick up the coins, he steals away into the jail and frees his friend, and a portly butcher who was also imprisoned. Their escape attempt goes sour when the royal guard surrounds them, and, after some fighting, both are thrown into jail.

Hung and Hu are released from jail when the high official receives a government order that the Dragon Gang be destroyed. The high official reasons that they could have Hung and Hu do the dirty work, after which the guards could easily kill them. Shortly after their release, Hung returns to the jail to beat up the provincial judge and free the butcher, who was still in the jail. Let me state here that the butcher subplot goes absolutely nowhere and he isn’t heard from for the rest of the film.

A few days later, Hung and Hu happen across some Dragon Gang thugs who are trying to beat up an old man and his daughter, who owe them money. Hung and Hu step in and kill some of the gang members in the ensuing fight, not to mention winning the favor of the man and his daughter, the latter of whom falls for Hung. That night, Hung is out looking for food for the four and he happens across a restaurant where the female owner is crying. She explains that her son was chosen by the Dragon mistress to be her husband, and that the Dragon mistress has a knack for killing her husbands if they don’t satisfy her. Hung finds this a good opportunity to infiltrate the Dragon Gang, posing as the groom.

So they go ahead with their plan and Hung tries to kill the Dragon Mistress in their wedding chamber, but she’s able to poison him before he can slit her throat. A fight breaks out between the Dragon Mistress and a Taoist sorcerer (Shut Chung-Tin, Jade Dagger Ninja and Flying Guillotine, Part 2) in her employ, and our two heroes. Our heroes are able to flee, where the old man is able to restore Hung’s health.

By this time, the evil sorcerer decides to fight dirty against our heroes, so he turns a large muscular man (Cheng Fu-Heng, The Fearless Hyena) into a zombie and sends him to kill the old man and kidnap his daughter (Nancy Yen, The Seven Grandmasters). Hung and Hu confront the zombie but are no match for it, and are beaten up quite well. There they meet a coffin maker and his daughter, the latter falls for Hu (because both our heroes need a nubile woman that we can imagine them getting with at the film’s end). Let me note parenthetically that the coffin maker and his daughter had appeared earlier in the film, although they seemed like a fair of extraneous characters until now. Coincidentally, the daughter has a martial arts manual that teaches a style needed to defeat the leaders of the Dragon Gang, plus a formula for a powder that can defeat the zombie…

If there is any problem with this film, it’s that the plot is pretty muddled and hard to follow, especially in the beginning. I mean it makes its own kind of sense, but there are far too many characters being introduced in the first act that it’s easy to get confused before things settle down a bit. We have our heroes, the Dragon Gang, the provincial judge, the evil official, the coffin maker and his daughter, that butcher that the heroes have to rescue for no reason whatsoever, and the medicine salesman and his daughter. There are some auxiliary heroes shown in the film’s opening that get murdered off the bat, so I wonder what the whole point of putting them into the film was. The film is fairly fast-paced, although it loses a little bit of momentum near the end before the final set-pieces, although this happens in a lot of kung fu films.

The title of the film in Portuguese is Zumbis do Kung Fu, which translates into “Kung Fu Zombies.” That is partially accurate; there is only one zombie, but he does fight. Our heroes almost get transformed into zombies, so I guess that’s what made the translators feel justified in pluralizing the name. Let be honest, however, and state that the zombie doesn’t have a HUGE role in the film, he’s just an invincible lackey for the main bad guys and gets about 15 minutes of screen time or so. Now, in the English dub, the zombie is referred to as a “demon.” When we see him being “created”, the Taoist sorceror is performing a spell on the body of a regular person, which leads me to believe that the word “zumbi” used in the Portuguese title is just as accurate as “demon” in English, since the zombie is essentially a traditional voodoo-created zombie instead of a Romero-esque gut-muncher. Originally, a zombie was a person whose soul was captured by a voodoo practitioner, and thus was under the control of whomever had possession of the soul. The zombie here is the same thing, but rather than voodoo, it’s created by Taoist black magic. The zombie here does try to bite our heroes on a few occasions, giving it a minute resemblance to those zombies popularized by George Romero, but not too much.

The action direction is provided by Chen Mu Chuan, Sun Chi, and Huang Chih-Wei. Chen Mu Chuan is probably the most recognized of the three action directors, if not by name, then at least by his work. Chen was a fairly solid action director in Taiwan whose career allowed him to work with quite a number of famous people, including Chen Kuan-Tai and David Chiang. He definitely wasn’t as good as other Taiwanese action directors like Robert Tai, Tommy Lee, and Alan Chui, but he did have a few good moments from time to time. His best known film is the 1977 classic Iron Monkey, starring Chen Kuan Tai and Kam Kong. I think the film is a bit overrated and the action slow, but a lot of people love the film. He also furnished the action direction in David Chiang’s Lost Kung Fu Secrets and the cult “favorite”, Crippled Masters (the film that featured actual crippled people doing martial arts), both of which were reviewed by Nate Shumate of Cold Fusion Video (and both of which Nate wasn’t very enthusiastic about), not to mention the universally-despised Kung Fu of 8 Drunkards. Chen Mu Chuan does furnish quite a few solid fights in this film, leading me to believe that he could do some good work if he had the time, budget, and talent in front of the camera.

There are quite a few fights in this film and Chen and his cohorts make a valiant attempt to keep the action at as quick a pace the film itself. There are lots of weapons on display in the film, including sabers, dart guns, spears that transform into 3-section staffs, stone hammers, knives, and fans. The Dragon Gang mistress uses a dart gun that is reminiscent of the one that Cheng Pei-Pei uses in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), which is odd, considering that Ang Lee claimed that weapon was thought up by him. Early on, there’s a fight between Li Chung Chien and some Dragon Gang thugs where they use bombs full of lime powder and flaming carts, which makes for some interesting images. The fight between Meng Fei, Li Chun Chien, and the zombie reminds one of those fights involving iron vest masters, in which they hit him, he stands still, and nothing happens.

The action stays pretty creative until the end, when our heroes have to fight the evil official, who’s a master of the Toad style. The Toad style looks like it might have inspired the final fight of Kung Fu Hustle (2004), in which the villain “ribbits” like a toad does lots of toad-looking jump attacks. Also, Chen Mu Chuan takes a few pages from the Five Deadly Venoms (1978) and has the villain be nearly invincible, like the Lo Meng, the Toad Venom, was in that film. It is one of the best fights in the film, probably bested only by the previous free-for-all with the spear men. That fight was pretty cool, since it had Meng Fei and Li Chung Chien fighting a host of lackeys armed with spears that became grappling hooks and sabers with their bare hands and the occaional pole.

Meng Fei and Li Chung Chien looks pretty good during the film. Both actors use a number of Southern Shaolin styles, most notably hung gar (the Tiger-Crane style). Meng Fei was pretty talented martial artist who shot for the stars in the early 1970s, with films like Five Shaolin Masters and Prodigal Boxer, but quickly was relegated to Taiwanese films, where his career “flourished” to some degree. He fights quite good here, to be perfectly honest, and I can safely say that it’s one of his better films, fight-wise (for the record, the best fight I’ve seen from Meng Fei was the final fight for the Joseph Kuo film The Unbeaten 28). He certainly looks better here than in his early chopsockey films, that’s for sure. I’m not very familiar with Li Chung Chien’s work, but he does some solid fighting here, which is enough for me.

The music includes "Magic Fly" by the French band Space, which was used in Yuen Woo-Ping’s Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. It’s strange, but it has a nice, funky aura to it, so I approve heartily. I’d like to know where the filmmakers got that particular bit from. On the subject of sound, there are some truly weird sound effects used in this film. Besides the toad croaking that’s dubbed in during the final fight, we also get to here the sound effect of an airplane falling out of the air whenever anyone does one of those bionic jumps that they’re always doing in these movies. Moreoever, whenever the Dragon mistress uses her dart gun, it makes the sound of a revolver going off, despite the fact that there is no evidence that there is any gunpowder in her gun.

I’ll give this a film a marginal recommendation. The fights are better than expected and Chen Mu Chuan and company do an honest-to-God job to shake things up for each fight. The presence of a Taoist sorceror and a kung fu zombie is also welcome, not to mention a villain who uses a Toad style of kung fu. The plot is something of a mess, but I’ve been through films that are worse. When watching a Taiwanese kung fu film, you instinctively lower standards more than you would for a Jackie Chan film or a Shaw Brothers film. As a result, when films like this come along, you end being pleasantly surprised and enjoy the film more than you normally would. Call it damning with faint praise, but Guy with Secret Kung Fu comes across as being a lot better than a lot of other cheap little chopsockey films that have found their way into the public domain.