The Himalayan (1976)

The Himalayan (1976)
Chinese Title: 密宗聖手
Translation: Tantric Hand

 

Starring: Angela Mao, Dorian “Flashlegs” Tan Tao-Liang, Chen Sing, Sammo Hung, Han Ying-Chieh, Angela Wang, Huang Feng
Director: Huang Feng
Action Directors: Sammo Hung, Han Ying-Chieh

 

[Sixteen] years ago, I decided to write a book in Portuguese about the 55 greatest fight scenes ever filmed in Chinese cinema. I actually wrote the entire first draft and had even found a possible publisher (although the owner of the company wanted me to chip in with the publication costs and I simply did not have R$ 4000 just lying around at the time). The book itself was divided into four parts: Old school fights, Modern fights, “New Wave” (i.e. Wire-Fu) fights, and fights from films made after 1995. I had a lot of fun watching different movies (and individual fights via YouTube) as I looked classic set-pieces to include.

While I was writing, I did my best to avoid just packing the book with fights from names that people in Brazil would immediately recognize, like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li. While they certainly had their fair share of fights represented (it’s not for nothing that those three are known throughout the world), there are so many wonderfully awesome fights featuring other performers that I just had to include. While judging which fights to include, I often found myself saying, “There’s gotta be at least one fight from [so-and-so] and one or two fights from [so-and-so] in this book.”

Obviously, Angela Mao, the Female Bruce Lee herself (also known as the “Queen of Kung Fu”, could not be left out of my attempted literary endeavor. I reviewed quite a few fight scenes from a number of her movies and was ultimately able to narrow her best set pieces to about three final fights: this film’s, the end of Broken Oath, and the last duel of Two Great Cavaliers. Perhaps not surprisingly, the final showdowns to this film and Two Great Cavaliers are rather similar in that they have Angela Mao teaming up with a famous superkicker (“Flashlegs” Tan here and his disciple John Liu in the latter) to take down Chen Sing.

One thing that this movie had in its favor with regards to being included in my book was that it was also Dorian Tan’s best performance. While I appreciate his contributions to films like The Hot, The Cool, and The Vicious and The Leg Fighters, the finale to The Himalayan featured a lot more speed and snap from him than those films. Back when I was writing, any fight that could be considered the best of not just one, but two performers was an almost guaranteed shoe-in for inclusion. Ultimately, I think I ended up including the end of Broken Oath, although I did have an entry written about the climax to this film, even though it eventually got jettisoned.

Most reviews of The Himalayan place the film among Angela Mao’s better, but not the best, films. We’ll get into that reason following the plot synopsis. There is one reviewer, the man who ran the “The Martial Artist’s Guide to Hong Kong Films” website (which sadly hasn’t been updated in five years), who gave this film a 5/5 and called it one of the greatest martial arts films of all times. I understand why he says it, although my main beef with this film, which reflects what a lot of others say, prevents it from reach such lofty ground.

The movie proper begins with a voiceover narration talking about the difference between Buddhist martial arts in China, as represented by Shaolin kung fu, and those in Tibet/Nepal, as represented by the “Mi” style. It has been stated that the “Mi” in question refers to the Mi-Tsung Fist Style, which is associated with the Jing Wu academy and shows up in films like Fist of Legend. It’s not really that important, to be perfectly honest, since the two protagonists were not trained in the mi-tsung style and choreographers Sammo Hung and Han Ying-Chieh couldn’t really be bothered to try to depict it accurately. It almost makes me wonder why they even bothered in the first place.

We’re quickly introduced to Kao Chu (Chen Sing, The Shanghai 13 and Heroes of the Wild) and his adopted brother,  Kao I-Fan (Ling Hon, whose filmography is made up of adult movies produced by Golden Harvest) riding through the Himalayas on their way to a manor belonging to the Chang clan. Kao Chu has arranged for I-Fan to marry Ching Lan (Angela Mao, Lady Whirlwind and When Tae Kwon Do Strikes), the daughter of the Chang family patriarch. After a big Tibetan festival, complete with singing, dancing, and a brief display of kung fu between I-Fan and Ching Lan, the marriage date is set. Unfortunately, I-Fan is less than willing to marry Ching Lan, although it has more to do with his being against arranged marriages than Ching’s appearance, as Angela has rarely been more lovely than she is in this movie.

Kao Chu, however, won’t put up with his brothers sudden sentimentality. You see, Kao is more interested in the Chang family’s riches than his brother’s well-being. Said greediness on his part is now threatened. That is, until, he finds a fellow attending the festival that happens to look just like Kao I-Fan, minus a birth mark on his head. So Kao Chu arranges for some flunkies to ambush both him and his brother and then kills his I-Fan during the resulting fight. He then is able to convince village boy to assume his brother’s identity and marry Ching Lan (despite the fact that counterfeit I-Fan is married and has a baby child).

The marriage goes forth (during ceremony, keep an eye out for a young pre-fame Jackie Chan, who shows up in two scenes standing behind Han Ying-Chieh), much to the dismay of Chin Kang (Dorian Tan Tao-Liang, The Leg Fighters and Snake and Crane Secret), the Chang Family stable boy. Chin loves Ching Lan, but class differences keep them apart. Kao Chu takes notice of this and, after giving Chin a humiliating beating, arranges for the slutty maidservant, Man (Angela Wang, Gonna Get You) to seduce Chin.

Meanwhile, counterfeit I-Fan and Ching Lan are starting to grow on each other while Kao Chu slowly wins the favor of Ching Lan’s father, even if Uncle Chu (Han Ying-Chieh, A Touch of Zen and Duel of the Seven Tigers) doesn’t completely trust him. Soon it’s time to strike. Kao Chu attacks Ching Lan and renders her both unconscious and (when she wakes up) speechless. After hiding her body, both he and I-Fan accuse her of being a cheap adulteress. Patriarch Chang and Uncle Chu find Chin Kang and Man, who’s dressed as Ching Lan, enjoying each other’s company in a stable. Man flees before the men see her face, so they naturally assume that Ching Lan was having an affair with the stable boy. Chin Kang is almost beaten to death by Kao Chu, although his father gets him off the hook and he’s able to flee. Kao Chu then kills I-Fan and puts the murder weapon in the hand of a now-dazed Ching Lan, who is sentenced to death for her supposed treachery.

Luckily for Ching Lan, the Tibetans utilize a highly inefficient capital punishment method, namely, the person is tied to a raft and sent downriver. Yeah, nothing could possibly go wrong with that. Chin Kang, who has been more or less following Ching Lan, is able to rescue her. A visit to the falsified I-Fan’s village reveals that the bastard was already married and soon our two heroes are off to the nearest Buddhist temple to learn the kung fu skills they need to defeat Kao Chu and his tiger claw technique. Meanwhile, Kao Chu is busy killing off everybody around him whom he perceives as being a threat to his plans. By the time we reach the end of the movie, there’s really not going to be anybody left.

Despite the top billing being given to Angela Mao and Dorian Tan, Chen Sing is really the main star here. His Kao Chu character becomes one of the great villains of kung fu cinema through a combination of superior kung fu kills (Chen’s tiger claw has never looked as deadly than it does here) and just good acting. Chen Sing oozes sleazy villain at every turn, whether its concocting lies, brutalizing anybody who gets in his way, or even screwing the slutty maidservant (although in her case, both the second and third items apply to her). His tiger claw style, which is already a violent style by its very nature, accentuates his character perfectly. Chen Sing spent a good portion of his career playing the heavy (probably because of his sleazy mustache, as Keith Allison would put it) and he gives a career best performance here.

Angela Mao is her usual fiery self, although since she’s happily married and engaged for the first half, we in the audience get to see a side of her that we usually don’t see in her in these movies. Other than some playful ribbing prior to the marriage consummation, she seems to be just as loving a wife as one could hope for in a woman who could stare a hole in Wolverine’s skull (and luckily for false I-Fan, she doesn’t make him force her legs open like Lily Li and Judy Lee have done). However, once the [crap] starts hitting the fan, Angela becomes just as vicious and revenge-driven as she’s ever been in any of her films.

Let me note right here that I feel sorry for traditional Chinese brides. They really get the bad end of the stick at weddings. After the usual pleasantries that involve getting dressed up and bowing to both the Heavens and the Earth, the bride often just goes to the marriage chamber and sits on the side of the bed with her head down while the groom eats and drinks and parties with the other guests. That’s a rather unfair proposition, especially if the bride doesn’t even have any maidservants to keep her company.

If this film marks Chen Sing’s best performance (at least as a villain), it is also a high watermark in Dorian Tan Tao-Liang’s filmography, too. You see, Dorian Tan was a sublime cinematic kicker. He was not, however, much of an actor. He was decent when it came to playing stick-up-the-rear stoic and righteous types, but he didn’t have any range beyond that. Moreover, he was never much more than his kicking skills when it came to screen fighting; his hand and weapons techniques were often adequate at best. Unfortunately for Tan, once he moved to Taiwan to make moves there, a lot of the action directors there had absolutely no idea what to do with his skills, so we were often forced to see a great superkicker perform below his abilities. Compare that to his disciple John Liu, who was always charismatic in his movies and was blessed to work with choreography giants like the Yuen Clan, Ricky Cheng, Alan Chui, and Robert Tai in most of his movies, all of whom knew how to milk his abilities for all they were worth. Poor Tan, he had a great nickname but the people around him didn’t know how to make good on it.

Where was I, again? Oh yes, this was a high point in Dorian Tan’s career. He does a solid job of playing Chin Kang, who loves Ching Lan but can’t really do anything because he’s a simple stable boy while she’s a rich girl; he gets to emote a little more than he does in most of his other movies. This is also probably the only film that gave Tan a love scene, although the camera thankfully focuses on Angela Wang’s face during the brief act than on his. From the POV of action, I don’t hesitate to say that he furnishes his best work here. Sammo Hung and Han Ying-Chieh (probably a lot more the former than the latter) direct him to deliver the goods with speed, snap, height, and flexibility not often seen in his other movies. His multiple kicks and hop kicks are as powerful and swift as they ever were and, unlike some of his later Taiwanese movies, he uses both his legs instead of just his left leg.

My major beef with the movie is intimately tied to my favorite thing about the movie: the climatic duel. With regards to the former, the main thing I don’t like about this movie is that both Angela’s and Dorian’s skills are downplayed until the last 10 minutes, when they come back to the manor for an explosive confrontation against Kao Chu and his henchmen. Tan Tao-Liang gets to two fights prior that downplay his kicking and a brief sparring match with Angela that serves as an appetizer for the end. Angela gets a brief fight at the beginning and then doesn’t fight until the end (bar the aforementioned friendly sparring with Tan). I really wish that director Huang Feng could’ve paced the film a little better so that we could’ve gotten at least one more fight from the two before the finale. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of action, because we get to see Chen Sing fight a lot during the movie; I just wanted more from Angela Mao and Dorian Tan, that’s all.

That said, the climax is a wonderful display of kicking prowess from the two leads, as they beat about two dozen stuntmen (and Sammo Hung sporting a leather vest and a perm) to death with their feet. Sammo Hung was always a superior choreographer, even when he was in his early 20s competing against older, more experienced action directors like Tong Gaai, Lau Kar-Leung, and even fellow action director Han Ying-Chieh, whose work I’ve often classified as being okay at best. Sammo choreographed most of Angela’s films while she was at Golden Harvest studios and nobody could make her look as brutal and fierce as he could. He choreographed Tan in this film and in Hand of Death; this film is definitely better. When Angela and Dorian finally face off with Chen, we get a truly sublime two-on-one duel that ends on a very brutal note (you’ll never look at leaves the same again).

I think the movie’s year of release is significant, too. Depending on the source, this movie was either made in 1976 or the year before. 1976 was the year that brought us The Secret Rivals, which introduced the world at large to the combined prowess of John Liu and Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee, popularizing kicking-based styles after hand-based Southern styles had more or less dominated the box office since 1974. If this movie was made in 1975 as some sources suggest, than The Himalayan was really a movie before its time and a precursor to the formula that The Secret Rivals would make popular for the rest of the 1970s.

Beyond the action, The Himalayan benefits from a nice change of location, having been shot on location in Tibet (presumably during the summer). The costumes are also a bit different than what we see in your typical Republic-era chopsockey films. The revenge-driven storyline is standard, but its execution and emphasis on how the villain is able to take control of the protagonists’ estate help set it apart a little more. One may argue that the movie is less about revenge and more about a man whose greed drives him to murder more and more until his Day of Reckoning comes (in the form of kung fu justice, as it should). That alone is enough to set the film apart from the rest until the last act when the movie reverts back to a theme we all love: Don’t piss off Angela Mao, especially if she has another fellow superkicker on her side.