To Kill with Intrigue (1977)

To Kill with Intrigue (1977)
Aka: Big Brother of Dangsan
Chinese Title: 劍花煙雨江南
Translation: Sword Flower Misty Rain River South

 

Starring: Jackie Chan, Hsu Feng, San Yat-Lung, Yu Ling-Lung, George Wang
Director: Lo Wei
Action Directors: Jackie Chan, Chen Hsin-I

 

This is one of the rarest Jackie Chan movies over here in Brazil. I’ve seen its DVD for sale at only one store, meaning that it’s easier to buy it online than in person.  However, it’s also an insanely expensive movie, with most online retailers hocking it for somewhere between R$ 40 and R$ 50, which is far more than most people, including Jackie Chan fans, would be willing to shell over for a film that is generally ranked in the lower echelon of JC films. Heck, Jackie Chan himself has little good to say about this film and, when you look at it, he’s right to a certain extent. It’s certainly not your typical Jackie Chan action comedy.

Instead, To Kill with Intrigue is a wuxia film based on a story by Ku Lung, who wrote the stories for dozens of wuxia films produced by the Shaw Brothers. He also wrote the script to The Killer Meteors, the obscure Jackie Chan movie I reviewed several months back. Much like that film, To Kill with Intrigue has a fairly busy plot with a fair share of characters to keep track of (both films share some of the same cast members and people working behind the camera). This film represents a significant step up from that film, thanks to it having more (and more outlandish) action, an excellent performance by Hsu Feng, less insane (and inane) twists, and Jackie in the hero role.

I went into this film with fairly low expectations and came out rather surprised. It was not the piece of crap that many reviewers have made it out to be. It’s flawed of course; being equal turns melodramatic, violent, silly, and just plain bizarre. But then, you could make the same criticism about most Hong Kong wuxia film, especially the ones from the 1990s. What it wasn’t, in any case, was a waste of time.

The movie opens at the birthday party of a certain Mr. Lei (Ma Kei, The Iron Monkey and The Devil’s Owl). Lei is a rich nobleman of sorts who also happens to be a renowned martial artist. Everybody is present at his party except for his son, Sau Lei (Jackie Chan, The Karate Kid and Who Am I?). Sau Lei instead is hanging out somewhere, berating the maid, Chin-Chin (Yu Ling-Lung, The Killer Meteors), whom he impregnated. When Sau Lei does show up at the party, he insults all those who are present, calling them a bunch of parasites after free food (reminds me of a similar scene in Batman Begins).

After the guests leave, Mr. Lei is understandably upset with his son, until Sau Lei explains himself: A few days ago, Sau Lei received a severed hand with a bee tattooed on it. Mr. Lei is then reminded of how he fought against the Killer Bee Gang fifteen years before to the day and that they are probably going to show up at the party to get revenge. Sau Lei decides to stay behind and die with his parents, telling them that he got Chin Chin (let me just state for the record that Chin Chin means “penis” in Japanese) pregnant so that the family line would continue, and sent her away so that she could avoid the massacre.

Soon enough, the Killer Bee Gang does show up and what a bizarre sequence it is. First, a guy who comes across as the Chinese Nightcrawler appears and demands his severed hand back (which reminded me of that old ghost story about the guy who moans, “Who’s got my big toe?”). After that, a bunch of guys appear out of nowhere and there’s this bit with some lanterns lighting up in the dark and flying around. Then a bunch of coffins fly around and land on the ground near the Lei family. Out of the coffins rise a bunch of people wearing paper maché flower masks which look so bizarre that the entire scene comes across as the spiritual follow-up to Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster.

Anyway, a big fight breaks out between the Lei family, some of their friends, and the Killer Bee gang. In the end, everybody is slaughtered except for Sau Lei, who is spared by the Killer Bee leader, Ting (Hsu Feng, A Touch of Zen and The Fate of Lee Khan). She explains to Sau Lei that when his father tried to wipe out the gang years ago, he tried to kill her as well, leaving her with a large scar on her cheek. She tells Sau Lei that she’ll let him live so she can see him suffer.

Meanwhile, Chin Chin, who has fled, is taken in by Chen Chun (San Yat-Lung, The Double Crossers and The Dragon Lives Again), a friend of Sau Lei’s. After hanging out at his cabin for a few days and moping around because she thinks Sau Lei spurned her, she asks Chen Chun to take her away. Shortly after they leave the cabin, Sau Lei shows up and (obviously) finds it empty. While hanging around there, two strange things happen.

The first is that Ting shows up to taunt him, which leads to a bizarre scene where he hallucinates that Ting is Chin Chin and sleeps with her. She gets angry because he keeps muttering Chin Chin’s name in his sleep. Second, a group of assassins from the Bloody Rain Clan show up and try to kill Sau Lei. A big fight breaks out and Sau Lei is injured, but manages to kill one of the would-be killers. The assassins’ client, the head of the Dragon Escort Company (George Wang), shows up at the nick of time to save Sau Lei and declare that they were supposed to kill Chen Chun instead of Sau Lei.

Sau Lei is nursed back to health by Dragon Escort Company, but refuses the leader’s friendship and goes his marry way. He meets up with Ting, who tells him that the head of the escort company was the man who buried his parents. Sau Lei decides to repay the favor by joining the company. When the company is attacked by the Bloody Rain Clan, who are upset that they weren’t allowed to kill Sau Lei after he killed one of their number in self defense, Sau Lei steps up and takes on the entire clan in a big fight. Sau Lei receives a life-threatening injury and is saved by the intervention of Ting, who slaughters the entire clan and then takes Sau Lei into her custody to heal him.

I won’t continue summarizing the film, but there are still lots of fights ahead and a few revelations, too. I never found the film as convoluted as The Killer Meteors…or Kung Fu Cult Master and Butterfly and Sword for that matter. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, but most of them are painted fairly black and white (the script never makes it much of a mystery who is good and who is not) and it never got to be confusing. I don’t know, I’ve read a number of reviews that complained about a film having too many characters, but the only time I saw that as a liability was in Kung Fu Cult Master, which was a film that seemed like it was trying to fit an entire trilogy into 90 minutes.

The movie’s pace is pretty solid, far more so than The Killer Meteors. The latter seemed to have fight scenes at the end of each half hour of film. Here the first fight scene comes shortly after the fifteen-minute mark, and then come at regular intervals until the film’s end. The only flaw in that regard is that sometimes the melodrama, supplied in spades by Yu Ling-Lung, slows down some of the non-fighting scenes and is a bit overwrought. I realize that this is common in these sorts of films, but it can be a bit too much here.

Jackie Chan is, for the most part, playing against type. This was in the period in which Lo Wei was still trying to figure out how to market Chan. He had tried to make Chan into a villain and a Bruce Lee imitator the previous year, but to no avail. Here, he tries to turn Jackie Chan into the next Ti Lung (or Jimmy Wang Yu). It’s an interesting role for Jackie, especially since he gets two implied love scenes, which is uncommon for Chan. In the beginning of the film, he plays a complete jerk, although we learn that it was all a ruse. We also get to see Chan in a Ming Dynasty hairpiece, which is always a fun thing.

There are quite a few fights in this film, brought to you courtesy of Chan San-Yat and Jackie Chan himself. The former you may remember from The Killer Meteors and as Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh’s main choice of action director during his “middle period” (i.e. after Lau Kar-Leung went solo and before Chang Cheh started working with the Venom clan). The action direction in really uneven here, but we’ll get into that more in a moment. Despite being a wuxia film, there’s not a whole lot of sword fighting in this movie. Oh, there are lots of strange and exotic weapons to be seen, that’s for certain—just not a lot of swords. But we do get snake spears, daggers whose hafts have been sculpted and painted to look like bees, axes that fire grappling hooks, short swords, sabers, a huge club shaped like a man’s face (and painted in odd colors), etc.

The best fights in the movie belong to the numerous scuffles between Jackie Chan and Hsu Feng, who steals most of the film with her performance. The fights themselves are sharply choreographed and quickly executed. Hsu Feng gives one of the better martial performances I’ve seen from her, to the point that I want to investigate more of her filmography (like I need more  people whose career I needed to investigate). Hsu Feng, as an actress, is the best part of the movie is plays a woman who is powerful, ruthless, but emotionally vulnerable as well. Hsu Feng, we salute you!

The weak link in the fighting, besides a few moments in which the wirework is so poorly executed that a mesh network topography configuration would be less obvious, is the finale. Jackie Chan takes on San Yat-Lung in the finale and the results are less than satisfactory. San Yat-Lung has proven himself to be a good screen fighter by this point in the film, especially with his kicks. Jackie Chan needs no introduction, and when the finale comes, his character has drunken the blood of Hsu Feng, making him a super-powerful master. However, the choreography in this sequence is, for the most part, very sloppy. Oh boy it is sloppy. There are times when Jackie Chan just stands taking so many kicks to the face that I thought this was a Van Damme film. At numerous points in the fight the characters descend into the sloppy arm flailing in such a way that I thought the final fight was actually filmed in 1971 and choreographed by Jimmy Wang Yu, and the rest of the film was filmed in 1977 when fight choreography had made a number of forward strides.

The disappointing final fight aside, this is a solid old school kung fu movie that people should enjoy if they like random bizarreness and (mostly) quality fighting. Oh, the score is made up of stock music from Akira Ifukube’s library (Ifukube being the fellow to composed the scores for a lot of Japanese giant monster films, including part of the Godzilla series). His music is always welcome in a movie, be it whatever genre it may. I went into the film with low expectations and darn it, those expectations were met. So don’t hate on this film, people!