Night of the Assassins (1981)

Night of the Assassins (1981)
aka: Legend of the Assassinator; The Assassinator; Great Assassin; Stories of the Assassinators
Chinese Title: 刺客列傳
Translation: Assassin Biography

 

Starring: David Chiang, Shih Szu, Danny Lee, Kao Chiang, Wong Ching, Chu Ben-Ke, Wu Chia-Hsiang, Chang Chung-Kui, Chiu Ting, Tsai Hung
Director: Pao Hsueh-Li
Action Directors: Samuel Suen Sau-San, Li Long-Yin, Chang Chung-Kui

 

So we have another Taiwanese wuxia film based on a novel, this time by Sze-Ma. And like the recently-reviewed Mask of Vengeance, the source material was adapted to film by Katy Chin (who actually wrote some classic movies like The Heroes and Delightful Forest) and directed by her husband and partner Pao Hsueh-Li. This movie also has some of the same cast as Mask of Vengeance, including Shih Szu, Danny Lee, Wong Ching, and Kao Chiang. It even brought back two of that film’s action directors, Samuel Suen and Li Long-Yin. Considering the general mediocrity of Mask of Vengeance, I’m happy to report that Night of the Assassins is in many ways a better film.

Night of the Assassins is actually set in the Warring States era (circa 400 B.C.), even though the costumes (especially the military garb) belong to the Song Dynasty. In the kingdom of Chu (or Zhu or Zhou) lives Wu Tai-Shu (Mask of Vengeance’s Kao Chiang), a swordsman whose family was slaughtered by the current Chu king. His brother is killed in front of him by a treacherous Chu general and Wu Tai-Shu goes into hiding. One day, he wakes up with his hair all grey—no explanation is ever given for it—and he uses his new appearance to sneak past the checkpoints into a neighboring kingdom.

This neighboring kingdom—I think they’re called the Wu people—is run by the Duke (Wong Ching), who has run many a military campaign against the neighboring Chu. One of his princes, Kwang (Danny Lee, of Super InfraMan and The Killer), thinks that it is time for the Duke to go and a nicer, less bloodthirsty, guy to take his place. Like himself! Kwang is saved from an assassination attempt by Wu Tai-Shu and they make a pact: if Wu Tai-Shu helps Kwang depose the Duke, he will help Wu kill the Chu king.

Obviously, even if Kwang and Wu were to get past the Duke’s myriad of bodyguards and regular foot soldiers, he himself is a master swordsman. They need a sucker…I mean assassin…to do their dirty work for them. That is where Chuan Chu (David Chiang, of Shaolin Mantis and Vengeance!) comes in. Chuan Chu is a great swordsman who spends most of his time in the company of a courtesan, Yan Yan (Shih Szu). He would be the ideal person to try to kill the Duke without Wu and Kwang needing to sacrifice their own lives. They arrange for the military to arrest Yan Yan on spurious charges. When Chuan Chu inevitably steps in to protect her, he finds himself overpowered by the Duke’s guards. He is rescued by Wu Tai-Shu and Yan Yan is rescued by Prince Kwang. Kwang marries the two and gives them a royal estate to raise a family in exchange for a favor: when the time comes, Chuan Chu will have to kill the Duke.

Some of the politics is a bit murky due to the dubbing, but I eventually was able to put all the pieces in place without having to watch the movie a second time. The story is not especially complex, although the themes certainly are. The Duke is certainly not a standout guy: he orders Kwang’s assassination simply for suggesting that he lower taxes and quit his pointless military campaign against the Chu people…(the more things change, the more they stay the same). Beyond that, he is not portrayed as being aggressively evil, at least not with his subjects. Yeah, they talk about him forcing them to build a new palace while in the middle of a war, but we don’t see it. Does he deserve to be assassinated? The movie doesn’t show enough of his evil deeds to make a truly compelling argument for regicide.

Kwang has the outward appearance of a righteous man and potentially-righteous ruler, even if he is willing to throw another man’s life away in pursuit of his objectives. The ending plays out a bit as expected, although Kwang and Wu ultimately don’t have to pay the consequences of their actions. Nonetheless, the ending implies they are fully aware of the moral costs of their assassination plan, so it may be a hollow victory after all. Chuan Chu’s decision to go along with Kwang’s plan comes with consequences of its own, even if Kwan doesn’t feel them until years later. I have to admit, however, that some of the tragic scenes that occur during the execution of the assassination plot don’t really make any sense…muddled motives and all that.

Beyond that, I would say that the big problem in Katy Chin’s script is that it suffers a little from protagonist toggling. The movie opens with Wu Tai-Shu’s story, namely the murder of his brother (and last-living kinsman) and his desire for revenge against the Chu king. As we draw closer to the attempt on the Duke’s life, Wu Tai-Shu becomes less important and the story becomes more about Chuan Chu and how the assassination plot affects his family. On one level, that makes sense, since Chuan has a family and we as a viewer might sympathize more with the Chuan household than a loner like Wu. Some viewers, however, might ask why the story didn’t just focus on Chuan in the first place and simply treat Wu Tai-Shu as a supporting character.

The fight scenes were arranged by Samuel Suen, Li Long-Yin and Chang Chung-Kui. Chang Chung-Kui was stuntman or extra in more than 150 movies going back to 1971. He has over 20 credits as action director, including a number of adult-oriented action movies in the 1990s. Night of the Assassins was his only old school film. Some might recognize his name on a couple of Yukari Oshima’s lesser films, like Tiger Angels and Angel of Vengeance. Considering the pedigree of these three men, I was surprised at how good the action turned out. We aren’t quite talking about Ching Siu-Tung level of swordplay here, but it’s solid. It is actually better than the action in Samurai Death Bells and Mask of Vengeance, which featured the more seasoned Chen Mu-Chuan in the choreographer’s chair. The swordplay in those movies was either slow or felt too much like a Western swashbuckler.

The sword fighting here is a lot snappier in its execution than those movies. It also has that acrobatic quality that you see in Chinese sword forms without feeling like a synchronized dance routine. It hits that comfortable middle ground in that the choreography is undoubtedly Chinese, but not over-choreographed to the point where it loses all sense of danger. David Chiang fights with his fists, a sword and daggers in his fights and looks surprisingly good in them. Chiang was always hit and miss in his fight scenes, but Suen and company get a solid martial performance out of him. This was the same year he made Return of the Deadly Blade, which also had some very good swordplay from Mr. Chiang. I’ve definitely seen worse from him, that’s for sure. The other actors acquit themselves well, although femme fatale fans will be disappointed to learn that Shih Szu’s role is only a dramatic one.

Of all the movies that Crash Cinema released on DVD in the early 2000s as part of their numerous “collections”, Night of the Assassins is one of the better films they released. It has decent production values, well-choreographed fight scenes, and a great cast. The pace flounders from time to time, but it’s a good movie overall.

Plan B (2016)

Plan B (2016)
aka: Plan B: Scheiß auf Plan A

 

Starring: Can Aydin, Cha-Lee Yoon, Phong Giang, Eugene Boateng, Laurent Daniels, Julia Dietze, Gedeon Burkhard, Henry Meyer, Florian Kleine, Mike Möeller
Director: Ufuk Genc, Michael Popescu
Action Director: Can Aydin, Cha-Lee Yoon, Phong Giang

 

I think we can all agree that the Golden Age of Hong Kong Action, which went from about 1983 until the early 1990s, is long gone. We’ll probably never get it back. Oh of course, there were movies like Sha Po Lang (and its prequel, Flash Point) that gave us home for the future. But to be honest, as long as Donnie Yen was able to shoulder the burden of quality Hong Kong action by his lonesome, he could only do it for so long. The man is pushing 60 now. He might’ve passed the baton onto Wu Jing, but that guy is now making stupidly successful propaganda epics in the People’s Republic of China now. Vincent Zhao is pushing 50 and is unlikely do anything special outside of TV. And now that Chinese censorship is in full force today due to diabolically-implanted security laws, even those classics from the 80s and 90s are in danger.

Nonetheless, all is not totally lost. The previous decade saw a ginormous uptick in 80s nostalgia in popular culture: remakes, reboots, reference-heavy stuff like Stranger Things and Ready, Player One; etc. Filmmakers outside of Hong Kong also had the opportunity to make movies and shorts paying homage to their favorite action flix. There was the IndieGoGo film Unlucky Stars (2015), which took about three years to film and edit before it hit the festival circuit. There was loopy Kung Fury, which didn’t parody any specific film, but mainly a number of 80s action conventions in general.

Then we have Plan B, a German film made by a bunch of talented martial artists who apparently spent their formative years on a steady diet of Sammo Hung and (early) Donnie Yen movies.

Can Aydin, Yoon Cha-Lee, and Phong Giang play the creatively named Can, Cha and Phong, a trio of stuntmen who can never seem to land a gig. A lot of it has to do with Can being a bit of a diva: he always fights with the director in how the action scenes for whatever production he’s auditioning for should be filmed. Their “manager”, U-Gin (Eugene Boateng), gets them an audition just as Yoon is ready to leave the company and get a real job.

There is a problem, however. You see, U-Gin, is supposedly not very good with numbers. While normal people would understand this to mean that he can’t do math, what this means is that he’s borderline dyslexic when it comes to listening to and writing down numbers. So he and his three fighting friends show up at the wrong address for the audition. Instead of a low-budget action film, they stumble upon a kidnapping plot.

The victim is Victoria (Julia Dietz, of the Iron Sky films), the wife of a powerful crime lord named Gabriel (Henry Meyer). Much of Gabriel’s power stems not only from his illegal transactions, but also years and years of accumulating incriminating media (photos, videos, etc.) of important politicians and law enforcement officials. In other words, he’s untouchable because anyone who might oppose them has some dirty secret that he’s privy to. The kidnappers, led by a guy named Eddie (Florian Kleine), want to find the safe where Gabriel keeps the dirt.

But the thing is, only Gabriel really knows where it is. However, he has left clues to its location in four different locales in Berlin. Victoria knows the first locale, but not the others. The appearance of U-Gin and the three stuntmen presents Eddie with an intriguing possibility: instead of risking his own men’s lives on a wild goose chase, he’ll take one of them—Phong—hostage and send the other three out to retrieve the clues under threat of death. Considering that Phong’s wife is now pregnant, U-Gin, Can and Cha will be more than willing to do it. And thus the adventure begins…

So that’s the set-up for an action film that sees our heroes storming cafés run by Turkish gangsters, a strip club, a cemetery run by Devil worshippers, and more! As you might guess, every location our characters go to will be staffed with armed goons and martial artists for our characters to fight. There are also a pair of policemen—one whom is named Kopp (Laurent Daniels)—who are on their tale. Those guys don’t do much fighting, but help give the climax a John Woo flavor. Kopp also narrates the film.

The acting seems decent. The main characters have a good rapport going on between them. If you look at their filmographies, they worked together as stuntmen on numerous films: The Matrix Resurrections; Attrition; Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw; Cloud Atlas; Skylines; and Hitman: Agent 47, among others. They’re not quite Jackie, Sammo and Yuen, but they get along well onscreen and are insanely talented in the martial arts department, too. Being an 80s homage, there is a gag about the four leads dressing up as 80s pop culture characters: Can dresses up as Sylvester Stallone from Cobra; U-Gin dresses up as Michael Jackson from the “Thriller” video; Phong dresses up as Marty McFly; and Cha wears a yellow jacket a stripe on it a lá Game of Death (not quite 80s, but almost). A second running gag has Can so obsessed with Stallone that he quotes his movies verbatim throughout the film.

The action was choreographed by the three leads, who’d already had ample experience working in Hollywood (and Netflix) by this point. The movie opens with a gonzo action sequence in which our heroes take on an entire building full of bad guys with guns a-blazing and fisticuffs. The gunplay is so stylized and over-the-top that it feels like the gun-kata from Equilibrium, only more kinetic. When the sequence is over, we the viewer learn that the whole scene was just a visualization of action scene as dictated by Can.

The next fight sequence is more conventional group fight between Can, Cha and a bunch of Turkish gangsters. There is some great bootwork here, but viewers will notice one thing that may (or may not) turn them off to the film on the whole: the scene (as well as later fights) is undercranked like a 1990s Donnie Yen movie. I think they were going for the more natural, only-slightly sped-up aesthetic that the best Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movies featured. However, they seemed to kick it up an extra notch, putting it closer to Crystal Hunt and Iron Monkey than Police Story.

A later fight at the Least Sexiest Strip Club Ever pits Cha and Can against a female stripper-bouncer, whom I believe is played by Heidi Moneymaker (Scarlett Johansson’s stunt double in the MCU films). That’s a really good fight with some solid two-on-one and one-on-one choreography, with some nice moves by Moneymaker. The next big fight pits our heroes against a bunch of Satan-worshipping cultists, which is an obvious nod to Armour of God. The cultists are led by German action heavy Mike Möller (One Million K(l)icks), who plays a kung fu vampire(!). He faces off with Cha-Lee Yoon in a whirlwind exchange of kicks and take-downs.

The finale starts out John Woo—complete with two characters firing guns at each other on opposite sides of a partition—and ends as In the Line of Duty IV. Phong Giang fights a thin kung fu master who’s fighting style recalls that of Cho Wing from that movie. The latter throws in a small amount of shapes-based fighting to complement the 80s-style kickboxing choreography. Meanwhile, Can Aydin fights a large, muscular black man in a fight that is obviously a nod to Donnie’s scuffle with Michael Woods from that film, right down to them locking hands and twisting them downwards until one of them concedes. The fight is brutal, with Can going overboard on the brawling-esque punches at the end. And like In the Line of Duty IV, the film on the whole is a constant showcase for perfect, crisp, and over-the-top footwork, even moreso than its inspiration: jump kicks, spin kicks, roundhouse kicks, side kicks, foreward somersault axe kicks, backflip axe kicks, no-shadow kicks, etc. Plus the usual HK-inspired flips, falls, tumbles and broken furniture.

If you want pure action of the sort we don’t get anymore, Plan B should quench your thirst in that regard. You might argue that the sped-up fights are a little too Hong Kong for your tastes, but since Hong Kong can’t seem to do what Hong Kong used to do—at least without a myriad of wire assistance—than that should be a small price to pay. Since Plan A (Hong Kong) no longer delivers, try Plan B instead.

Bruce Tuan’s 7 Promises (1980)

Bruce Tuan’s 7 Promises (1980)
Aka: Seven Promises; Bruce Tuan 7 Promise; Born of Fighter
Chinese Title: 七巧鳳凰碧玉刀
Translation: Seven Skillful Phoenix Jasper Knife

 

Starring: Mang Fei, Yueh Hua, Alan Liu Te-Kai, Hsia Ling-Ling, Tin Ping-Chun, Chan Sing, Chin Po, Li Hsiang, Yuan Shen, Ku Cheng, Yi Yuan
Director: Liu Sung-Pai
Action Director: Hsiao Huang-Lung

 

So when is a Brucesploitation film not a Brucesploitation film? When it’s Bruce Tuan’s 7 Promises, a Gu Long wuxia pian that the local filmmakers inexplicably decided would have Bruce in the title. I mean, this is set in the Ming (or Song) dynasty, so the probability of running into a fellow named “Bruce” was rather slim. And as far as I could tell, there was nobody whose surname was “Tuan,” either. In fact, there are technically no “promises” either. I guess “Lord Yu’s Seven Counsels” sounds  a bit too philosophical for the wuxia crowd, so “Bruce Tuan’s 7 Promises” it was!

The movie starts by introducing us to the Jade Sword, a powerful weapon that is capable of slashing people without actually touching them. Sort of like how video games have swords firing crescent-shaped energy blasts, but here said blasts would be invincible. The sword is currently in the possession of the righteous Lord Yu (Yi Yuan, of Duel of Karate and Furious Slaughter). Lord Yu is sorta a mediator in the Martial World, justly keeping all the clans and organizations in order.

Lord Yu’s son (Meng Fei, of The Prodigal Boxer and The Unbeaten 28) has now come of age and is about to participate in an arranged marriage with the daughter of a nobleman in a distant village. For the record, he is also called Lord Yu in the film, so I’ll just call him Yu in this review. Instead of bestowing the Jade Sword to Yu, dad has his son take the sword to his future father-in-law as an engagement gift. Before Yu sets out, his father gives him seven hints to living and long and healthy life in the martial world:

 

1.      Never look for trouble; keep to yourself;

2.      Don’t strike up friendships with complete strangers;

3.      Never gamble with strangers;

4.      Always be courteous to a monk;

5.      Never display your purse;

6.      Don’t believe all you hear;

7.      Avoid the women that will be your weakness.

Yu then sets off into the world to meet his betrothed and start life anew. He stops at a restaurant on the way—standard kung fu movie behavior. There he meets a beautiful girl, Hua Yulai (Chin Po of The Silver Spear and The Professional Killer), and another woman pretending to be a man. A couple of long-haired monks show up at the restaurant and try to carry off Hua. Yu steps in and beats them up. A grateful Hua invites Yu over to her estate for some tea. And what about dad’s advice, Yu?

Hua Yulai gets Yu drunk and comes close to bedding him, although he feigns passing out before they can get down and dirty. When she herself gives up and goes to bed, Yu gets up and sneaks out of the house. He later realizes that the sword is no longer with him, but when he goes back to retrieve his weapon, both it and Miss Hua have disappeared. While wandering through the forest, he meets a drunk fisherman named Chow San (Yueh Hua, of Come Drink with Me and Green Dragon Inn). Chow San fancies himself a busybody of the region and directs Yu to the local Buddhist temple to talk to a Priest Ku. On his way to the temple, Yu is set upon by a trio of killers decked in white and red demanding the Jade Sword. He is saved by the woman in man’s clothing (now in woman’s clothing), who identifies herself as Chow Cho-Fei ((Secret of Chinese Kung Fu’s Hsia Ling-Ling, playing the sort of role that might have been reserved for Doris Lung). She agrees to accompany him on his journey.

At the temple, a couple monks inform Yu that they have never heard of Priest Ku. However, a visit to a local restaurant reveals that the owner is a former Buddhist nun. She informs him that the man, Ku, is gambling with some buddies in a hidden room beneath the restaurant. Yu meets Ku (Tin Ping-Chu, of Legend of Chu Liu Hsiang), who is gambling with a explosives expert Wang Fei (Eighteen Fatal Strikes’ Hak Lung) and Lu Shao-Yun (Ku Cheng, of Dressed to Fight and 13 Golden Nuns). Once again, Yu breaks his father’s rules and engages in some gambling with these men, winning thousands of taels of gold without even realizing it. However, since he had come to the table with no money at all, he refuses his earnings, which wins him the men’s respect.

They tell him that the four monks he fought in the restaurant belong to Abbot Tee Shu (Chan Sing, of The Himalayan and Black Panther), a former Shaolin monk who struck out on his own and formed his own sect. The three men take Yu to see the Abbot, but their visit is interrupted by the arrival of a dead body. The corpse is Lu Shao-Yun’s son, and the Jade Sword is embedded in his body. Naturally, the men suspect of Yu of foul play and the Abbot tries to kill him. With the help of Chow Cho-Fei, who has been following Yu in secret, Yu escapes.

At this point, I think a reel of film is missing, because Yu and Chow end up in an abandoned house miles away with a large trunk in their possession. Inside the trunk is the body of a man who is slowly dying of poisoning (Alan Liu Te-Kai). Yu cures him. At this point, things start getting convoluted. Abbot Tee Shu puts a bounty of Yu’s head for the murder of Lu Shao-Yun’s son, but eventually is murdered himself…by the Jade Sword. Who is the behind the murder? Is it Miss Hua? Is it Lord Yu? Does it have anything to do with the mysterious Green Dragon Gang that people talk about in hushed tones? If so, who leads said gang?

Bruce Tuan’s 7 Promises was based on a story by famed wuxia author Gu Long, who also wrote the screenplay. It certainly has the feel of a late 70s Shaw Brothers film by Chu Yuan, who generally adapted Gu Long’s material into film at the time. It is lacking in a budget, although I’m sure that if someone did a digital restoration, complete with widescreen and subtitles, it would look almost as good as its Shaw Brothers counterparts. I also think that subtitles would help viewers make sense of the story, as the dubbing might cause some viewers to get lose in the myriad of characters.

The story is pretty typical wuxia, a righteous (and in this case, slightly naïve) martial artist gets involved with corruption in the Martial World. The general gist of Young Lord Yu’s character is that he often finds himself in situations where he has to choose between his father’s advice and the needs of the moment, and is flexible enough to do the right thing while honest enough to not allow himself to get dragged into the evil around him. This ends up serving him well as his adventure continues, all the way up to the end, when we get an actual happy ending to one of these things, complete with requited love!

As expected, the film suffers from having too many characters to keep track of, many of whom have the same ancient Chinese hairstyles. Well, this film is not quite so bad in that respect, but there are a lot of characters, several of whom show up for a couple of scenes only to disappear without ever giving us an explanation as to why we needed to care about them. The striking example is Wang Fei, who introduces himself as a famous explosives expert. But other than throwing leaves like shuriken, he doesn’t blow up anything and dies before he can do anything important. Chan Sing’s role as the worldly abbot also feels truncated, as if he was supposed to be more important than he ended up being to the finished film.

The action here was choreographed by Hsiao Huang-Long, who has graced these pages in films like Shaolin Deadly Kicks and Eunuch of the Western Palace. Hsiao was a competent, if unremarkable, action director and this movie is nothing different. The action serves its purpose, although most viewers will probably forget the fights a few minutes after finishing it. The climax is also a letdown in terms of fighting: it promises more than it actually delivers. Hsiao Huang-Long’s best film is still Shaolin Deadly Kicks, as far as I’m concerned.

Meng Fei mainly fights on the defensive in this movie, so the fights are generally him acrobatically dodging enemies as they attack him with diverse weapons, like swords, sabers, poles, and even grappling hooks. The best of these is aforementioned trio of sword-wielding assassins, who attack in tandem with synchronized routines. That fight is reminiscent of Jackie’s classic moments in films like Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin and The Fearless Hyena. It even ends on a blackly funny note, with them adopting what is a essentially a suicide formation. The acrobatic-defensive routine does start to grow old as the film progresses, even if it is consistent with Meng Fei’s character.

7 Promises does okay with its convoluted story and average action. The best part about the movie is Meng Fei’s interaction with his female counterpart, Chow Cho-Fei. At one point, we learn that she’s apparently an undercover detective for the court. But that’s not all we learn about her. But she makes a great cynical (but caring) foil to Lord Yu’s naïve, but kind do-gooder. And it comes to a head at the end. Unlike so many kung fu movies, that more or less stop after the climatic fight, this one actually wraps up the story with another scene afterward.

But there is one thing…who the hell was Bruce Tuan, guys?

Xtremo (2021)

Xtremo (2021)
aka: Xtreme

 

Starring: Teo García, Óscar Jaenada, Óscar Casas, Andrea Duro, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Alberto Jo Lee, Luis Zahera, Juan Diego, Andrés Herrera, Nao Albet
Director: Daniel Benmayor
Action Director: Teo García, Genaro Rodriguez, Jose Álvarez-Boze

 

It’s always interesting to watch countries all over the world make their own martial arts movies—or at least action movies in which martial arts is a big part of the action. The Hong Kong-China-Taiwan triumvirate has been in the game for decades and decades and produced thousands of movies between each other (even if Taiwan has largely stopped since the turn of the millennium). The United States has been a big producer since the early 1970s. Japan has its samurai-jidai geki-chanbara movies, with its more karate-focused movies popping up in fits and spurts, such as the mid-1970s during the Sonny Chiba karate boom or during the 2000s and early 2010s.

And then you have other countries, in which their output could probably counted a single hand. Brazil has a few: Bruce Lee vs. GayPower (which is more of a parody); Gaiola da Morte; Besouro; and few MMA biopics. Martial artist Marko Zaror represented Chile in films like Mandrill and Kiltro. For a while, it felt like France was leading the West with movies like Banlieue 13 and Hollywood co-productions like Kiss of the Dragon, The Transporter movies, and Danny the Dog. Finland gave us the wuxia fantasy Jade Warrior. Superkicker Ron Smoorenberg, a native of the Netherlands, made Fighting Fish. Cambodia recently took a tip from its SE Asian neighbors—Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia—and made Jailbreak. I can only hope that we will see the day in which every country in the world is represented on this site: “And this week, I review Yap Island’s remake of the Taiwanese classic: Bandits, Prostitutes and Large Stone Coins.”

Xtremo is Spain’s foray into the martial arts/action genre, with a final product that strongly resembles John Wick in terms of style and action. It doesn’t reach that film’s heights, but I think action junkies should get something out watching this. The movie opens with the two sons—one biological, one of affection—of a Spanish crime boss doing a drug deal with the Colombians. The biological son, Lucero (Óscar Jaenada, of The Shallows and The Losers), double-crosses the Colombians, as he deems the terms of their contract to be borderline extortion. A big gunfight breaks out and both Lucero and Maximo (Teo Garciá) slaughter the entire gang in a hail of bullets. Apparently, this is supposed to be Maximo’s last gig before going straight and living out his life with his young son.

Unfortunately, Lucero has other plans. He knows that his father, Ricardo (Juan Diego), favors Máximo over him, as Lucero is too violent for his tastes. So, Lucero stages a hostile takeover and kills his dad. He sends his man Finito (Sergio Peres-Mencheta, of Rambo: Last Blood and Resident Evil: Afterlife) to kill Máximo and his son. He only succeeds halfway. Ricardo also has an adopted daughter, María (Juan of the Dead’s Andrea Duro), who escaped Lucero’s treachery and went into hiding.

Two years later, both María and Maximo are in hiding, biding their time until it is time to get their revenge on their brother. Maximo lives in an abandoned(?) auto garage, practicing the martial arts and staying in shape. His life is changed forever when he meets Leo (Óscar Casas, of The Orphanage), a street-level drug pusher. Leo sells narcotics to pay his family’s bills in the wake of his abusive father’s death. His immediate boss, Jaro (Nao Albet), stands below Finito on the hierarchy. When Jaro and his men start abusing Leo for skimming the profits, Maximo steps in and fends for the boy. This will bring Maximo’s attention to Finito, who initially tries to take care of him without informing Lucero. But as Maximo was daddy’s favorite mob enforcer, the bodies are going to pile up very fast. A collision course between Maximo, María and Lucero is all but guaranteed.

Xtremo is a hardcore action film. That is not to say that it doesn’t have its lulls and slower moments, but when the action kicks in, it is brutal. The movie opens with a bloody shootout at a drug lab run by the Colombians, which itself is kicked off by the revelation that a duffle bag full of money is actually housing the severed head of the drug boss’s own son. In short order, there is a vicious fight at Maximo’s flat which ends in a child getting shot to death—onscreen, albeit obscured by furniture (and that is not the only child character to get brutally murdered, either). There are several torture sequences, including two scenes of people getting their hands repeatedly smashed by a door. In other words, Xtremo does not mess around and is definitely not for the squeamish.

The action alternates between bone-breaking martial arts sequences and gunplay. The opening firefight is shot well, although it suffers from Hollywood clichés: guns that never need reloading (seriously, how many times can you fire a revolver without reloading before we the viewer notice?) and the Stormtrooper Effect. I mean, you have two guys firing handguns at dozens of men armed with AK-47s and yet the former never need to duck behind a column? Come on, people! A second shoot-out happens on the floor of a dance club that’s covered in smoke and definitely has a John Wick feel to it. There is also a third bullet ballet at the climax that ends with our hero taking down four people with a single spray from an AK-47. It reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson’s line from Jackie Brown: “When you absolutely, positive need to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes.”

The martial arts sequences aren’t bad in and of themselves, but often suffer from inadequate lighting and the occasional moment of chaotic camerawork. That said, Teo García and his crew do make a good faith effort to vary the fights so that no two fights feel exactly the same. The opening scuffle at the apartment involves knives, a wooden club, and García stabbing multiple opponents with a wall hook. There is a prolonged fight in the restroom of a nightclub in which García fends off multiple attackers while holding one guy in a joint lock, often using the latter as a human shield/punching back. Even better is a fight at the car garage, which involves nail guns, a bolt cutter, and a pair of wrenches, escrima style. The latter element reminds me of Street Knight in what was the best fight of that particular film.

The flashiest fight pits García against Lucero’s Japanese bodyguard, played by Alberto Jo Lee. I’m guessing Jo Le studied tae kwon do, because he’s a great kicker. He has that Korean whiplash-like kick aura about him, like Hwang Jang Lee and Bobby Kim on their best days. His kicking style here is similar to Toshiro from Ong Bak and it makes a nice contrast to García’s more pragamatic style, no doubt taken from García’s own special forces training. I’m disappointed that García wins the fight through a moment of trickery, not because he’s the better (or more resourceful) fighter.

The climax, in addition to gunplay, features a knife fight, reminiscent of the one Jean-Claude Van Damme had in Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Once again, as García had extensive military training in addition to other styles, he sells his knife fighting quite well. The film ends with a katana fight between García and Jaenada, which is pretty solid. It obviously is no match for similar fights in So Close or Rurouni Kenshin, but it will do. Andrea Duro (and her stunt double) also step in for some two-on-one goodness, complete with some crazy jiu-jitsu takedowns.

I did like Teo García playing the main hero. He isn’t a particularly charismatic actor, but his stockier build, greying hair, and pushing-50 age makes for a nice departure from the Hollywood male underwear model body type that one often finds in these movies. García has also trained in muay thai, kung fu (we see him practicing on a wooden dummy several times in the movie), kempo, and kobudo, or traditional Okinawan weapons (hence the katana fight). Like Keanu Reeves in John Wick, García’s Maximo character takes more than his fair share of licks, stabbings and gunshot wounds. He is not invincible, simply (to quote John Wick) “a man of focus, commitment, and sheer will.”

García gets a good showcase for his undoubtable physical skills, which is impressive, considering the man’s age. I wish the filmmakers had made more of an effort to keep the fight scenes cleaner and more visible, and the gunfights free of the usual logic lapses. The story is pretty standard stuff, but that’s fine. I generally don’t complain about these things unless it gets so bad as to be actively distracting. But if you want brutal, hard-R action, then you can certainly do worse than Xtremo.

Jade Warrior (2006)

Jade Warrior (2006)
Aka: Jadesoturi

 

Starring: Tommi Eronen, Markku Peltola, Zhang Jingchu, Krista Kosonen, Hao Dang, Cheng Taishen
Director: Antti-Jussi Annila
Action Director: Yu Yankai

 

To understand Jade Warrior, a perfunctory understanding of Finnish folklore is advisable. There is an 19^th-century epic poem known as a Kalevala, which is considered one of the most important works in all of Finnish literature. Much like Prose Edda in Nordic folklore and Die Nibelungen for the Germans, the Kalevala had a pivotal role in establishing the Finnish national identity—for centuries they had belonged to Sweden, after which the territory was ceded to Russia. This particular work strengthened the Finns’ sense of connection to their native language, which helped them strive for their own sovereignty.

The story of the Kalevala initially retells the story of Creation from the point of view of Finnish mythology. It goes into the story of the First Man, Väinämöinen, and his endless (and fruitless) adventures to find a wife. He tries to seduce the daughter of Louhi, a powerful witch, but is unsuccessful. She later promises him one if he can make her a sampo, a magical device that guarantees material prosperity—according to the film The Day the Earth Froze, it can produce endless supplies of grain, gold, etc. Väinämöinen employs the services of a blacksmith named Seppo Ilmarinen. Much like his employer, Ilmarinen wants a wife, but one always seems to elude him. He eventually does make the sampo, and many of the subsequent stories in the Kalevala involve the device and how it affects different characters’ lives.

Jade Warrior takes this myth and combines it with a Chinese legend of a powerful female demon named Nocktress (at least that’s her name in the Portuguese subtitles of the disc I watched) who laid nine eggs. From eight of the eggs were born eight demons: Hate, Avarice, Fear, Ugliness, Greed, Desire… The last egg did not hatch along with the others, but when it finally did, it did not receive a name.

So where do these stories meet? Well, the ninth demon has stolen the sampo with the hopes of establishing Hell on Earth. It is hiding out in a swamp somewhere in China and growing more powerful as time passes. However, there is a prophecy that the son of the blacksmith who forged the sampo is destined to kill the demon and save the world. His reward for doing so will be Nirvana, or Enlightenment, and thus freedom from the cycle of reincarnation.

Jump to Finland in modern times. Kai (Tommi Eronen, of Sauna) is a professional blacksmith whose forge is located on the outskirts of Helsinki. He has recently broken up with his girlfriend, Ronja (Krista Kosonen, who had a small role in Blade Runner 2049), and is pretty down in the dumps about the whole thing. He may even be borderline suicidal at this point. Fate steps in when Ronja visits an antique shop with a handful of Kai’s old things, which she wants to get rid of before leaving town. The owner of the shop, Berg (Markku Peltola), and his colleague, Maria (Elle Kull), are what you might call Kalevala enthusiasts. They have recently come into possession of the mummified remains of a man holding a strange metal ark with Chinese ideograms inscribed on it. Could this be the fabled sampo?

Berg hasn’t be able to open the ark, although he does make an interesting discovery. One of the objects that belonged to guy is filled with ashes, which Ronja pointed out used to be her ex-boyfriend’s hair and fingernails (apparently a blacksmith’s trick for adding carbon to the metal). Well, when Berg’s fingers, dirtied with ash, touch the ark, the object reacts. Berg figures that the ark has something to do with Kai and makes a visit to the boonies to see Kai. After a few visits, Berg shows him the ark and has Kai touch it, which causes the device to open. At this point, Berg starts going crazy and demands that Kai build him a sampo.

As Kai does this, he starts having flashbacks to pre-Dynastic China, in which the Seppu Sintai (also Tommi Ernonen), the son of a Chinese blacksmith and a Finnish woman, is being escorted by a bunch of monks to the swamp where the Ninth Demon resides. He is aware of the prophecy and knows that he is the world’s Only Hope. However, before killing the demon (or getting killed in the process), Sintai asks his friend, Cho (Hao Dang, of Tracing Shadow and The Great Protector), to let him visit Cho’s old village so that he may live like a normal person for one day. Cho relents and Sintai heads to the village, located at the edge of the swamp.

During his visit, Sintai meets Pin Yu (Zhang Jingchu, of Rush Hour 3 and Seven Swords) and falls head over heels for her. While the two grow close after their first meeting, Pin Yu holds a secret that will ultimately cause Sintai to compromise his mission. Meanwhile, as Kai draws closer and closer to completing the sampo, the world draws nearer and nearer to complete destruction.

Jade Warrior is one of those films that you respect for its intentions than the film itself. Obviously, we spent much of the 70s, early 80s, and 90s with wuxia movies that dealt with super-powered warriors battling each other for control of the martial world. When Crouching Tiger,Hidden Tiger came out, it turned the wuxia into a pretentious arthouse affair. Jade Warrior continues this trend, albeit with the added twist of interweaving the story with Finnish folklore and alternating storylines, one of which is set in modern Scandinavia. That is a novel approach, although if you start to think about it for more than a few minutes, it starts to fall apart.

One of the problems is that the movie brings up how the Ancient China portion of the story is set in pre-Dynastic China. Well, the whole bit about Nirvana and leaving the birth cycle is very much a Hindu idea that was imported into Buddhism—Siddartha Gautama was born a Hindu. So, it wouldn’t make sense for that to even be a thing in this movie, since Buddhism did not even reach China until A.D. 65 during the Han Dynasty. And you probably wouldn’t have monks, at least not in the Shaolin monk mold. You can also argue that the Iron Age, iron being the material that the ark and the sampo are presumably been built with, did not start in China until the Warring States period (453 – 221 B.C.), so a pre-Dynastic setting would also not work.

One may also wonder how a Finnish woman (or tribe) would wander all the way into China at that period. As I understand it, the territory we know today as Finland was inhabited by hunter-gatherers in the interior and by the Stone Age Kiukainen culture along the coast during the pre-Shang Dynasty period. And considering that what we know as China was a lot smaller than the current country, a tribe would probably have to travel through what is modern-day Russia, interact with Karasuk pastoralists in Central Asia and then with Altaic pastoralists in western China, before reaching the territory inhabited by early Sino peoples. I suppose if one Neolithic tribe in Finland broke up and wandered east for a few decades or so, they might eventually find their way into China.

I suppose you could negate the above criticisms by presuming that the Finnish woman hailed from Norse (or Finnish) mythology-era Scandinavia and migrated to mythological Yellow Emperor/Huangdi-era China. That way, you could probably get around the bits about whether or not the sampo should have been forged in stone, bronze or iron. And by mythology logic, wandering halfway across the world is easier to swallow as well.

Getting past those details—and trust me, many viewers may not even notice them—you have a slow-moving story with limited settings that practically renders this movie as a chamber piece. That would not be a problem in and of itself, but it makes for a strangely intimate movie about the creation and unleashing of THE DOOMSDAY DEVICE by (whom is essentially) the Devil’s Son. The movie deals with the impending apocalypse in a very subtle manner: mainly scenes showing us the residents of Helsinki standing in the street staring at neon-green clouds in the sky. It is a little spooky, but you would expect that unleashing the Gates of Hell would have a bit more…well…pizzazz. At least Lucio Fulci gave us zombies, maggot storms, killer priests, and people puking up their digestive systems.

There is not a whole lot of fighting in this movie, even if it is nominally a martial arts film. What little we get is choreographed by Yu Yankai. Hong Kong cinema fans will know him best as Collin Chou’s kung fu teacher in Blade of Fury (1993) and the blacksmith who gets his face ripped off by Vincent Zhao at the beginning of Fong Sai Yuk (1993). There is a fight scene early on involving some hunter-gatherers that is filmed and edited a bit chaotically, boding ill for the rest of the movie. Later on, we have one of those old school fight scenes where one character taunts and beats him with a stick in such a way that channels Simon Yuen Siu-Tin tormenting a student in any given late 70s kung fu comedy. Later on, a Chinese man attacks Sintai and the latter evades using all manner of slow motion, wire-assisted flips and acrobatics. The Hero and House of Flying Daggers influence is definitely obvious here.

The next fight is a lot better, which is where Zhang Jingchu and Tommi Eronen have what can best be described as a bagua courting ritual. Pin Yu is testing Sintai’s kung fu and starts performing slow-motion bagua—a lá the good Jet Li in The One—like a synchronized dance. At point point she whips out her signature weapon: a polearm with a fan-like arrangement of blades at one end. I always like seeing that particular internal style in any movie, so it is definitely welcome here, even if the slow motion is overdone. But then again, you could probably make the same complaint about The Grandmaster and Yuen Woo-Ping won an award for that. So what do I know?

The final fight is set in modern times and involves Tommi Eronen attacking an unarmed, doughy, middle-aged man with a pair of sledgehammers. This sequence is actually well-mounted and pretty exciting. I think I liked it even more than the sledgehammer duel at the end of the Japanese MA film Blood Heat. My only complaint is that the denouement of the movie really drags and drags. It wraps up the story well, but we’re talking Return of the King levels of last-second reveals and conclusions. The movie is slow paced as it is, we didn’t need twenty minutes of glacially paced conclusions to interrupt and follow the climax.

Mask of Vengeance (1980)

Mask of Vengeance (1980)
aka: The Magic Sword; The Great Conspiracy
Chinese Title: 風流殘劍血無痕
Translation: Merry Remnant Sword without a trace of blood

 

Starring: Kao Chiang, Shih Szu, Nora Miao, Roc Tien Peng, Han Yu, Wang Lai, Chin Feng, cameos by Kam Kong, Dorian Tan Tao-Liang, Tsai Hung, Danny Lee, and Chang Yi-Tao (Bruce Lai)
Director: Pao Hsueh-Li
Action Director: Chen Mu-Chuan, Jacky Chen Shao-Lung, Samuel Suen Sau-San, Mao Ching-Shun, Li Long-Yin

Mask of Vengeance is not an easy film to review. The story is pure wuxia in that it feels like a thousand-page novel condensed into 99 minutes. Even in the last 15 minutes or so, new characters are being introduced, plot twists are popping up like rabid prairie dogs on crack, and when the smoke clears, you’re still not sure what exactly the movie was about. I admit I had that feeling when watching Kung Fu Cult Master and Butterfly and Sword, movies that took about three or four viewings for me to understand the story. But in the ensuing decades, I thought I had matured enough that I could decipher a wuxia film on my first try. I was wrong.

The movie begins with dozens of swordsmen (and fighters in general) descending upon a Pai Wah City for a big Knife Competition that the city’s head, a mysterious guy in a mask—in fact, his entire entourage, including the guys at the registration tables, wears masks—is putting on. Among the intended combatants are Tu Yuan-Chu (Kao Chiang, of Dragon Fist and Beauty Escort) and Shu Yu-Wen[1] (Shih Szu, of Heroes of Sung and Supermen Against the Orient), a young lady trying to pass off as a man. Tu Yuan-Chu draws attention after he reveals that his weapon for the contest is a peculiar jade dagger.

Tu Yuan-Chu goes to see the head of Pai Wah City and requests that he end the tournament to avoid a major bloodbath. You see, in addition to a lot of money, one of the rewards for the winner is a treasured martial arts manual about Knife Skills. Tu Yuan-Chu knows that there will inevitably be a bloodbath as the losers will try to jump the winner and steal the manual, and then turn on each other, too. The main mask guy agrees, but on the condition that Tu go seek out his old rival, a powerful martial artist who’s both lame and blind. Tu initially balks, but after losing a duel to the Pai Wah noble-mask-guy, agrees. The latter even gives Tu the manual and declares him the winner before the contest even starts. Tu goes on his way to track down the elusive Blind and Lame Master (who will be played later on by Chang Yi-Tao, of YoungTaosim Fighter and Clones of Bruce Lee).

It doesn’t take very long for different entities in the Martial World to start ambushing Tu. The first is a group of swordsman led by Shaw Brothers veteran Wong Ching (The Men from the Monastery and The Savage 5). Tu is saved by the intervention of two swordswomen, one of whom is Lady Shao (Nora Miao, of Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin and Samurai Death Bells). We never really learn about Lady Shao’s motives for helping Tu, other than that they’re relatively honest. I guess her scabbard would to house his two-edged straight sword. Subsequent attacks on Tu are fended off by Shu Yu-Wen, who is a master of the throwing dart. Tu also makes the acquaintance of a bum who was at the contest. There is also a one-armed swordsman named Mei Hen-Tian (Han Yu, of Ninja in the Deadly Trap) who will play an important in the story.

We do learn that Tu Yuan-Chu is looking for his father, a famed swordsman known as “Chivalry” Tu Lin-Xiao. When Tu notices that his transient friend carries a familiar sword, he asks the latter where he got it. Visiting the locale—a cave on the side of a mountain—Tu finds his Uncle Chi (Kam Kong, of Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin and The Crane Fighters). Uncle Chi informs him that his dad needed to sacrifice himself for the Crippled Party Clan, but that Chi sliced off his own arm in his stead. Other than that, no new clues about Chivalry Tu’s whereabouts.

A visit to the local Buddhist Temple reveals that Chivalry Tu had visited the temple a week before his disappearance ten years before to leave a picture of a girl in the abbot’s hands. Tu then discovers that the picture was later picked up by a member of another clan, who claimed that another man paid him to do it. Tu Yuan-Chu thinks that it might have been Mei Lin-Yen, whom we will discover later on is the Blind and Lame Master. Shu Yu-Wen shows up and reveals that she has been following Tu Yuen-Tu around. She suggests that Mei Lin-Yen’s wife had fallen for Chivalry Tu and given him her picture, which Lame-Blind Guy wanted to get back.

About this point, the movie becomes nearly incomprehensible as the revelations start piling up about people’s real identities. I’ll do my best to spell it out here, although anyone who wants to watch the movie can skip this paragraph. Long story short: Mei Lin-Yen was married to one lady (Wang Lai, of the Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre movies), with whom he had one son: one-armed swordsman Mei Hen-Tian. He had an affair with Chivalry Tu’s wife, and their love child is Tu Yuen-Chu. Obviously, Chivalry Tu didn’t take that offense sitting down, so he became the head of the Crippled Party Clan in Pai Wai City and slaughtered most of the Mei Clan and maimed Lin-Yen, turning him to the Blind and Lame Master. He also raised his wife’s bastard child as his own, only to use him as a pawn to kill the Yuen-Chu’s own biological father. I think that Shu Yu-Wen is actually Chivalry Tu’s biological daughter, although she eventually falls in love with Mei Hen-Tian. Meanwhile, I still don’t know what the deal is with Nora Miao’s character.

If you want to get on my bad side early on, make a movie with Shih Szu and Nora Miao—two of the most beautiful women of the 1970s—, give them top billing and the make them supporting characters in someone else’s movie. Nora Miao fares the worst in that regard: she shows up in one scene during the first act, disappears for the entire second act, and then shows up out of nowhere near the climax. And once again, what exactly is her character’s motivation? Moreover, what was all that nonsense about Uncle Chi about? I’m still trying to figure that out. Maybe something was lost in translation. Or maybe screenwriter Katy Chin (the director’s wife and a scribe of dozens of 70s kung fu movies) should have simplified author Do Ku-Hung’s story just a smidgen more.

Another aspect of the story I didn’t like. The Chinese title refers to the main character’s jade dagger, which he claims has never drawn a single drop of human blood. Nonetheless, despite its small size, the weapon is capable of breaking other swords in half with incredible ease. You’d think with that pedigree, the weapon would definitely come in handy at the climax. I mean, the main villain is so powerful that it takes four characters ganging up on him to finally bring him down. It would have made perfect sense for our hero to finally bust out the jade dagger to cut down the bad guy for the GREATER GOOD. Nope. It feels like the dagger was supposed to be Chekhov’s gun…but simply goes forgotten for the rest of the movie.

Mask of Vengeance boasts no fewer than five action directors. Leading the pack are Taiwanese veterans Chen Mu-Chuan and Jacky Chen Shao-Lung (or Chan Siu-Lung). Chen Mu-Chuan is a well-known name around these parts, best known for his work on cult hits like The Iron Monkey; The Crippled Masters; and the awful Monkey Fist, Floating Snake (which he also starred in). Jacky Chen Shao-Lung was a talented martial artist and choreographer, although his career was fairly uneven (as opposed to Chen Mu-Chuan’s dependable mediocrity). Chen could blow you away with awesome choreography in something like The Fearless Dragons, and then underwhelm you with Tai Chi Shadow Boxing. Assisting them are bunch of veteran stuntmen with few choreographer credits. Samuel Suen did some stuntwork for a few Shaw Brothers movies that Chang Cheh produced in Taiwan (to get around quotas in SE Asian markets), plus did action direction for Night of the Assassins, which I’ll get around to soon. Mao Ching-Sun is better known as Angela Mao’s brother and had small fighting roles in scores of Taiwanese movies. Finally, Li Long-Yin is Lee Yi-Min’s brother and also spent most of his career as an extra, although he choreographed a few movies, including the aforementioned Night of the Assassins.

The choreography is grounded for the most part, despite this being a wuxia film. There are a few Superman flying moments, but those are few and far between. The action is mainly swordplay, which sometimes feels like a 50s Hollywood swashbuckler and sometimes feels more like a Peking Opera dance. There is some hand-to-hand combat at different moments, which is unremarkable in its execution. The film has two superkickers in the cast—Tan Tao-Liang and Chang Yi-Tao—but the former does no kicking and the latter throws a few kicks before running away. Bad use of great talent, people! There are a variety of weapons used, which is welcome. Besides the usual swords and sabers, we have characters who fight with hook swords, snake swords, flutes that double as dart guns, umbrellas, lanterns, and iron rings.

The last twenty minutes or so are pretty insane. You have bomb-throwing assassins, trap doors leading to hidden dungeons, and mind control! Then throw in a cameo from Danny Lee as a masked assassin! Don’t forget a villain with an invincible iron arm technique! High body count? You bet! All of this, not to mention Shih Szu killing dozens with her dart-throwing skills. It’s almost enough to make up for the film’s shortcomings: the hard-to-follow plot, the misuse of two superkickers in the cast, and the bait-and-switch casting of Shaw Brothers starlet Shih Szu and Golden Harvest muse Nora Miao. In the end, however, Mask of Vengeance is just sorta okay.

---

[1] - She later re-introduces herself as Xian Wu-Han, although it has no bearing on the story as far as I could tell.

The Yin Yang Master movies

Once in a while, Hollywood will give a year in which two studios give us competing films about the same subject matter. According to Wikipedia, these are known as "Twin Films". For example:

1997 - Dante's Peak and Volcano
1998 - Deep Impact and Armageddon; Antz and A Bug's Life; Saving Private Ryan and A Thin Red Line
1999 - Entrapment and The Thomas Crown Affair
2000 - Mission to Mars and Red Planet
2007 - An American Crime and The Girl Next Door
2012 - Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman
2013 - Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down
2014 - Legend of Hercules and Hercules

...and the list goes on.

I'm sure the same thing happens in other countries that have their own robust film industries. When discussing Chinese movies (Hong Kong, Taiwan and PRC), these are bit more difficult to track, especially when discussing martial arts movies, because usually they have produced so many films in a given year that it's hard to classify them as such. Also, since Hong Kong has historically been fairly trendy when it comes to making movies, you can have a successful movie and several fly-by-night studios producing similar films in a matter of months (or weeks). It doesn't always have quite the same feel as Warner Bros and Universal making a movie about the same thing.

The Wikipedia article on twin films suggests that Ip Man: The Final Fight and The Grandmaster were examples of the phenomenon. I would include Red Cliff part 1 and Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (both from 2008) as examples, too. What other examples can you come up with?

Tonight I'll present you with a pair of short reviews about a recent example of this: two Yin Yang Master movies.

The Yin Yang Master: Dream of Eternity (2020)

Starring: Mark Chao, Allen Deng, Chun Xi, Duo Wang, Wang Ziwen, Xu Kaicheng
Director: Guo Jingming
Action Director: Nuo Sun

Qing Ming (this time played by Young Detective Dee's Mark Chao) is a Yin-Yang Master in training. His master is killed during a battle with the Evil Serpent, a giant kaiju snake that's the embodiment of all of mankind's negative emotions. The Evil Serpent's soul is currently "locked" inside the body of someone residing at the Imperial Palace. Knowing that it's time is at hand, four demon hunters (including Qing Ming) are dispatched to the palace to collect demon spirits and and "feed" them to the Four Guardians (Dragon, Tiger, Vermillion and Turtle) so as to awaken them so that they may battle the Evil Serpent when it awakens. But things do not go as planned.

After the action-packed beginning, the film becomes something of a court-based murder mystery, The court high priest is murdered and soon the demon hunters--Boya (Allen Deng); Longyue (Chun Xia, aka Jessie Li); and Shouyue (Duo Wang)--being to suspect each other of being involved in foul play. NOTE: Boya also appeared in other adaptation, albeit with a different backstory and characterization. Here, Boya and Qing Ming have a strong bromance thing going on. Things come to a head at about the 90-minute mark, after which the film becomes a warped love story. That quickly leads into an overlong climax involving a rampaging kaiju snake and angel-like Spirit Guardians battling with it. It feels like an extended cut scene from a very realistic-looking RPG game.

Dream of Eternity is a more mature production than its equally big-budget counterpart. The violence is harsher, but the story is also deeper and far more nuanced. The bad guys are just bad guys for evil's sake. They have complex motives driven by nuanced emotions and backstories. They main problem is that a lot of this we learn in the last act while we're supposed to be enjoying the climatic carnage. That would be one of the pitfalls of playing the movie like a mystery and then like a epic fantasy with a World-Ending Event: we spent the first 70% of the movie in the dark, and then the action and exposition keep on tripping over each other.

For the most part, the CGI is really good for this sort of film. The snake looks awesome, a far cry from the crap we got in films like Python and Boa and the later Anaconda sequels. The costumes are also very good. The film has great production values all around. There is some limited wuxia action courtesy of Nuo Sun, who also worked on Legend of Ravaging Dynasties. Nothing great, but not bad.

Fans of wuxia and fantasy should get something out of it. Glancing at the film's entry on Douban, it didn't seem to be very popular with the local audiences. The film had good ticket pre-sales but bad word of mouth, and Shock Wave 2 overtook it at the box office. One female reviewer said that she'd break up with her boyfriend for taking her to watch it(!). Another reviewer said that its alternate titles should be: "Doctor Strange's God Baby" and "Chen Lingzhi, please call me by your name". I'm sure the last one refers to the homosexual undertones that the friendship between Qing Ming and Boya have.

  

The Yin Yang Master (2021)

 

Starring: Chen Kun, Zhou Xun, William Chan Wai-Ting, Qu Chu-Xiao, Wang Li-Kun, Shen Yue, Cici Wang, Wang Yue-Yi, He Yong-Sheng
Director: Lin Wei-Ran
Action Director: Nicky Li Chung-Chi

Since the days of Panku, humans and monsters have walked the Earth. At some point, an evil nine-headed dragon showed up and led the monsters against the humans. He was defeated through a magic sword and the monsters were more or less banished to the Monster Realm, while the humans stayed in our world, with the Yin Yang Bureau keeping patrol over any monster who would cross over illegally into our world. One day, a murderous monster called Snow Lady (Summer Xia) is freed from her prison and tries to steal the Scale Stone, which contains the soul of the dragon. The blame falls on Yin Yang master Qing Ming (Chen Kun, of Flying Swords of Dragon Gate and Painted Skin: Resurrection), a human-monster hybrid. He flees into the forest, where he takes care of outcast monsters and spirits.

Years later, a pair of Raven warriors steal the Scale Stone and flee into the forest. The stone is stolen by Qing Ming's three Ferret spirits, one of whom swallows it. When he realizes what has happened, he heads into the Monster Realm to find the sword. Accompanying him is a human court guard, Yuen Boya (Wandering Earth's Qu Chuxiao), and cute female spirit, Shenle (Shen Yue). The Yin Yang Bureau, led by Baini (Painted Skin's Zhou Xun), is also in pursuit. Old bonds will be tested and new ones will be formed as the Scale Stone comes closer and closer into the wrong hands.

This is a wuxia fantasy filled with monsters, magical attacks, wire-assisted swordplay, talking animals, cute female nature spirits, solid digital effects, and the ever-graceful Zhou Xun. The action is handled by Nicky Li Chung-Chi, but if you don't like fantasy combat, you won't enjoy this. There is a neat fight with a four-armed opponent early on--it turns out to be three CGI ferrets beneath a cloak. But most of the action revolves around flying people, CGI ice attacks, and magical shield spells. Stuff like that.

I've noticed this in some Chinese fantasy films, and in the popular RPG Genshin Impact [1], but it often feels like the world is limited to a single human city. The world feels especially smaller that way, which is bad for what should be a sprawling epic fantasy. In this film, it almost feels like the world is limited to Pingqing City, while the Monster Realm is limited to a single city, too. I had the same vibe in League of Gods, although that one threw in an underwater city and a desert realm and stuff like that. In this movie, the world-ending conflict feels like a dispute between two cities. But this is a personal observation and not really a knock against the film.