Showdown (1972)

Showdown (1972)
Aka: Royal Fist
Chinese Title: 天王拳
Translation: Heavenly King Fist

 

Starring: Jimmy Wang Yu, Chang Ching-Ching, Chiang Pin, Lu Ti, Fuh Bih-Huei, Chan Wai-Lau,Ke Fu-Chen, Shan Mao, Hsueh Han
Director: Ting Shan-Hsi
Action Director: Kwan Hung

 

When is an early 70s basher not an early 70s basher? The answer is: When it’s Jimmy Wang Yu’s Showdown. In that case, what would appear to be an early 70s basher is actually closer to a wuxia pian, but set in the Republic Era. Not many wuxia films are set after the Qing Dynasty, the only one that sorta comes to mind is What Price Survival? From 1994. This an odd duck of the film, which sort of follows Jimmy Wang Yu’s movement in the direction of weird when it came to his kung fu movies—perhaps as a way to offset his limited formal MA training.

The movie opens at a camp of Chinese soldiers, presumably at some point during the Warlord Era. The soldiers, led by (whom I think is) the Purple Darts’ Chou Shao-Ching, are out collecting taxes and have just bought themselves a young lady for their amusement and pleasure. Before they can molest the poor girl, a stranger in white (Jimmy Wang Yu, who needs no intro) shows up and rescues her. At about the same time, a bunch of bandits clad in black show up and steal all the money. The stranger, Fong Xiao Ching “the White Dragon”, has come to the region looking for the bandits who murdered his father. Could they be the same people who stole the tax money?

Anyway, Fong takes the girl—who was injured during the raid—to the nearest inn, run by Tang Sung (Lu Ti, of Four Riders and Man of Iron). Tang Sung was the martial brother of Fong’s dad and now runs the inn together with his wife (Fuh Bih-Huei, Heroes Behind Enemy Lines and Fantasies Beyond the Pearly Curtain), his mother (The Fearless Hyena’s Chan Wai-Lau in drag), and his children and their families. What Fong Xiao Ching discovers after his arrival is that he had actually had an arranged marriage to Tang’s youngest daughter, Hsiang Yen (Chang Ching-Ching, The One-Armed Swordswoman and The Big Fight). So, those two start exchanging flirty looks. At the request of Granny, Fong and Hsiang Yen are wed. It is only then that Fong discovers that the Tang family are robbers and the price for leaving the inn and its environs is death…

The thing is, Showdown is a mix of genres, mainly kung fu and comedy. Several scenes are sped up for obvious comic value, like whenever someone is running away from someone else, or when the aforementioned soldiers show up at the inn looking for a free meal. Moreover, there are a number of esoteric styles mentioned and displayed, including the ability for Fong Xiao Ching to disappear and reappear several yards away, a lá Nightcrawler from the X-Men. That sort of approach to the action, combined with the fact that most of the fights involve weapons, give this film a more wuxia feel. Indeed, if it were set in any dynasty prior to the Republic Era, it would surely be classified as a wuxia by filmgoers.

The action sequences are staged by Kwan Hung, who also did the action for JWY’s Rage of the Masters and Beach of the War Gods. Much like wuxia films, characters can jump—through reverse footage projection—up entire cliffs, kick stand and dirt as if they were projectiles, and all sorts of craziness. Chang Ching-Ching wields a pair of double short swords known as “The Twin Blades of Doom.” Wang Yu also wields a sword, but sometimes engages in hand-to-hand combat, like during a duel with Taiwanese regular Shan Mao, who plays a Japanese bandit. At that point, the fighting is typical JWY arm flailing. In another fight, he takes on an entire bandit army (brandishing swords, whips and staves) with a log of wood. It all culminates in a 10-minute climax in which the evil bandits (led by JWY regular Hsueh Han) team up with the soldiers to attack the inn, and JWY and Chang Ching-Ching fight them off with swords. The choreography picks up a bit in this sequence, considering that Wang Yu was more convincing with a weapon than with his bare hands. In the end, Showdown is harmless fluff that I’d recommend more for Jimmy Wang Yu completists.

The Invincible (1972)

The Invincible (1972)
Chinese Title: 縱橫天下
Translation: Vertically and Horizontally (Across) the World

 

Starring: Jimmy Wang Yu, Paul Chang Chung, Helen Ma Hoi-Lun, Ma Chi, Tsao Chien, Hsueh Han, Guan Yi, Yuan Shen
Director: Lo Chen
Action Director: Hsieh Hsing

 

Although the lone review of The Invincible at the HKMDB gives this a five out of ten, I thought this was actually one of the better Jimmy Wang Yu films that I have seen…ever. And that includes those movies for which he is best known: The One-Armed Swordsman; The One-Armed Boxer; and Master of the Flying Guillotine. Like the similarly titled The Invincible Sword (also starring Wang Yu), this is a rollicking adventure set during the Southern Song period when the Han Chinese were at war with the Jurchen-led Jin Dynasty.

The film is set during the reign of the Jin emperor Wanyan Liang (A.D. 1149–1161), played here by Paul Chang Chung (The Invincible Eight and Fantasy Mission Force). As in real life, Liang has the ambition to unite China—now divided into the Southern Song, Jin and Western Xia kingdoms—into a single empire under his rule. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

For now, let’s focus on some other characters. More specifically Wanyan Liang’s sister, Wanyan Changqing (Deaf Mute Heroine’s Helen Ma). When we meet her, she is being chased by a bunch of Song soldiers, who eventually engage in combat with her. Enter Li Mu-Bai (Jimmy Wang Yu, whose character bears the same name as Chow Yun-Fat’s character from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), a Song swordsman extraordinaire who sees a woman in distress and fights off the soldiers. Changqing is taken with the man’s chivalry, and the two part ways. Li Mu-Bai is on his way to his hometown, Jiangnan, which is not far away from where the Jin armies are gathering to invade Song territory. On his way, he comes across a village that has been completely destroyed by the Jin, at which point he vows he will utterly destroy their nation.

Once in Jiangnan, he meets up with the great Marshal Yu (Yuen Shen, of The Evil Karate and The Shaolin Kids), who is presumably the real-life personage Yu Yunwen, through a friend (Ma Chi, of The Beautiful Swordwoman and The Bravest Revenge). This is where Li Mu-Bai learns that he had unwittingly helped and protected a Jin princess from his own team. An embarrassed Li Mu-Bai tries to take his own life, but is convinced by the officials to lead some men against Emperor Wanyan Liang. Li Mu-Bai, driven by remorse for his mistakes and anger against the Jins in general, decides to go on a suicide mission to assassinate the emperor himself.

Li Mu-Bai sneaks into Jin territory and attacks the emperor whilst the latter is hunting, but is ultimately injured by archers and overpowered by Wanyan Changqing in personal combat. Instead of killing him on the spot, the emperor takes him captive. During interrogation, Princess Changqing, who is visibly smitten with Li Mu-Bai, fakes blinding him and has him taken to the dungeon. There, she frees him and hides him in her quarters until her brother leaves for the battlefront. She then takes him to the border and lets him return to his land in peace. But the Emperor Wanyan is not finished with Li Mu-Bai yet…

According to history, the real Jin emperor Wanyan Liang was a bit of an S.O.B. and did a lot to earn the ire of his subordinates, both noblemen and soldiers alike. He ran two failed campaigns to cross the Yangtze River and was eventually murdered by his own soldiers. In The Invincible he is even more loathsome, casually raping his subordinates’ wives and killing servant girls after stripping them naked (yes, there are boobies in this, although the camera never lingers on them). This eventually comes back to bite him in the ass at the very end, and we the viewer are quite happy to see him die.

Jimmy Wang Yu’s Li Mu-Bai is similar in character and ability to the swordsman he plays in The Invincible Sword. And I’ll be honest, I think this is one of his best physical performances, period. We all know that Wang Yu looks better with a sword than he does with his hands, but he’s actually quite good with everything here. He has a hand-to-hand battle with Mao Shan early on and his handwork is far crisper and more exact than it is in his basher films. A later fight has him taking on some Song officials armed with poles, which he also wields with the same efficiency he afforded his swordplay. Speaking of which, under Hsieh Hsing’s action direction (he would later choreography JWY in The Killer Meteors), he looks as good with a sword here as he did in his best Shaw movies, if not better. After watching a whole slew of these early 70s martial arts films, I can say that Jimmy Wang Yu actually surpassed the likes of contemporaries like Shih Chun, David Tang, Chiang Nan, Wai Wang, and others.

Complementing Wang Yu quite nicely is Helen Ma as the Jin Princess Wanyan Changqing. Helen Ma is a stronger actress than the likes of Chang Ching-Ching and Lisa Chiao-Chiao, frequent co-stars of Wang Yu. She is also more convincing as a swordswoman than Hsu Feng, at least reaching the level of badassery as contemporary Cheng Pei Pei. Her character here has to move back and forth between romantic, action bad ass, and woman of culture and Helen Ma does it quite effortlessly. Her character is actually supposed to be the strongest fighter of the entire film, which she does fairly well, considering the cast of Taiwanese wuxia/basher regulars. And between hers and Wang Yu’s performances, the interesting historical backdrop of the story and the strong action throughout, I consider The Invincible to be a minor gem.

Heroic Duo (2003)

Heroic Duo (2003)
Chinese Title: 雙雄
Translation: Duo

 

Starring: Leon Lai Ming, Ekin Cheng Yee-Kin, Francis Ng Chun-Yu, Karena Lam Ka-Yan, Raymond Wong Ho-Yin, Anson Leung Chun-Yat, Samuel Pang King-Chi, Rico Kwok Nik-Hang, Kam Hing-Yin, Xu Jinglei
Director: Benny Chan
Action Director: Stephen Tung Wai

 

Heroic Duo is almost the “lost” film in the filmography of the late Benny Chan, sandwiched between the universally-reviled Gen Y-Cops and Jackie Chan’s New Police Story. It has a unique premise, a fair amount of competently-staged action, and lots of cops getting mowed down, a Benny Chan trademark. It has good-looking actors turning in solid performances and Francis Ng playing a smooth-but-vile bad guy. So why don’t people talk about it as much as Benny Chan’s other movies, including his failures? Let’s see if we figure this out.

The movie begins at the house of a policeman, K. L. Cheung (Kenny Wong, of The Storm Warriors and Invisible Target), who has been taken hostage by a bunch of bad guys, led by The Mission’s Francis Ng. Cheung informs the head honcho that somebody is in prison, after which he is shot to death in front of his wife in cold blood.

Switch to the apartment of Senior Inspector Ken Li (Ekin Cheng, of The Storm Riders and A Man Called Hero), who is plagued by dreams about rescuing some girl from drowning. Li is woken up by a series of phone calls from work regarding an urgent situation. One of the higher ups has recently entered the station’s evidence vault, stolen some files, and then set everything else on fire. During interrogation, the man claims to have no memory of stealing the files. He claims he was hypnotized, flashing back to a bar where a mysterious stranger handed him a drawing of a man and a little girl. Shortly after the interrogation, the officer steals a gun and shoots himself in the head.

As far-fetched as it may seem, Ken isn’t about to discard the hypnosis theory outright. He has men look up records of any registered hypnotists that have ever been prosecuted for crimes. This leads him to Jack Lai (Leon Lai, of City Hunter and Seven Swords), a trained hypnotist and former police psychiatric consultant. Lai has been convicted of manslaughter after apparently shooting a man at his apartment, but has managed to get supervised league to lecture to psychology students at the local university. Ken Li offers to help lighten his sentence if Jack will help him out on this case.

The stolen files belong to a group of policemen who were chosen to work as special security guards at an auction for a series of priceless Egyptian jewels. Jack thinks that whoever had the files stolen did so in order to create a psychological profile of each guard in order to steal the jewels. Ken takes Jack to the auction to keep watch over the proceedings. However, things go south when Jack hypnotizes Ken into stealing the jewels himself, which makes Ken a target for the police, led by the unhinged Officer Yeung (Raymond Wong, of Lifeline and The Death Curse). There is a big shoot-out between the police and the jewelry thieves, but the only one who ends up in police custody is Ken.

Obviously, hypnotism doesn’t go all that far as an excuse in legal matters, so it appears that Ken is up the creek. He does however, have an ace up his sleeve. One of the cops on the case is his long-suffering girlfriend, Brenda (Karena Lam, of Dragon Blade and The White Storm 2). Brenda knows Ken hasn’t done any wrong and Ken convinces her to do a background check on Jack, including his family and friends. You see, before hypnotizing Ken, Jack left in his mind a mental image of a drawing of calm, moonlight sea. Ken is able to recreate the image, which turns out to read “SOS” when viewed from a certain angle. We then learn that the main bad guy, whom Jack calls “Mastermind,” has not only kidnapped Jack’s wife, Mandy (Xu Jinglei, of The Warlords and The Shinjuku Incident), but K.L. Cheung’s widow and children, too. Jack has to get the jewels back in order to protect them, but when do bad guys ever keep their promises? The only external force that can help him is Ken (and Brenda), but Ken has the entire department on his heels…

I like the idea of a violent cop thriller revolving around hypnotism. I wish more had been done with the premise. The movie never really explains how the rather complex orders are given to those hypnotized. The camera does cut away from the scene once the characters are falling into trance, so it might be the traditional, “You will do my bidding…” That surely would have been so cartoony so as to deflate most of the film’s tension. The script also glosses over how exactly the dueling hypnotists can put people into trance so easily. There is a lot of talk about exploiting the back doors to people’s minds, but what we see on film feels more like something that would make a person feel uncomfortable, not give up their free will.

Benny Chan is known for his violent commercial action flicks that pile on the sentimentality whenever it needs to manipulate the audience’s feelings—except Gen-Y Cops. This one does it in measured doses during the second act, but then ruins the climax by hauling in the mawkishness with a dump truck. By the time there is only twenty minutes left, the heroes have converged at the villains’ hideout—a James Bondian-base built under a highway tunnel—and the bad guys’ gang has been whittled down to just a couple. That’s a lot of time for a cat-and-mouse game given the race against time that are heroes are engaged in. Thus we get these drawn-out, slow-motion shots of Leon Lai desperately trying to rescue his loved ones from confinement while the heroes and villains just look on. And when the heroes are able to turn the tables on the “Mastermind,” the idea is a lot sillier in execution than it looked on paper.

The action, staged by Stephen Tung Wai, is solid, albeit unexceptional. Although Tung Wai has been in the game since the 1970s and is often considered one of the top action directors in the business, I have rarely seen him do anything that rose above “workmanlike and efficient.” He can do “slick modern action” like nobody’s business, but very few of his films feature set pieces that are for the ages. This is the case here. Tung Wai fills the screen with gunfights, car chases, a few stunts that Jackie Chan would approve of, and the occasional burst of fisticuffs from Ekin Cheng. There are even a handful of moments where Benny and Stephen set the screen alight with pyrotechnics. I’m sure that when a certain character is enveloped in flames at the end, there is CGI used. But surprisingly enough, it wasn’t so bad as to distract me from the film as a whole, as CGI fire in Chinese cinema is wont to do even to this day. That said, the action still feels like the sort of generic thing that your average Hollywood stunt coordinator could’ve pulled off in 2003.

So why doesn’t anyone talk about Heroic Duo much anymore? I mean, I’m pretty sure people still have fond memories of Gen-X Cops and stuff like that. I’m guessing that once you get past the underdeveloped premise, the film is just too generic, even for an action auteur like Benny Chan. Stephen Tung Wai would have had to have upped his game to A Better Tomorrow levels, or Benny would have had to have cast Donnie Yen in Ekin’s stead, in order to give more chutzpah to movie about jewelry thieves with an unexpected modus operandi.

A Girl Fighter (1972)

A Girl Fighter (1972)
Aka: Girl Boxer
Chinese Title: 女拳師
Translation: Female/Woman Boxer

 

Starring: Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng, Roc Tien Peng, Luo Bin, Ko Hsiang-Ting, Lui Ming, Ko Hsiao-Pao, Tsao Chien, Chan Wai-Lau, Wan Chung-Shan, Miao Tian
Director: Yang Shih-Ching
Action Director: Pan Yao-Kun

 

One of the unwritten rules of “basher movies”—kung fu movies made in the early 1970s in the wake of the success of The Chinese Boxer—was that most of them would take place in the Republic Era, and occasionally in modern times. A lot of that has to with the general cheapness of the production and the ability to save money on costumes, wigs, and complex sets. Exceptions were few. The most notable was The Prodigal Boxer (1972), which was set in the Qing Dynasty and was about Chinese folk hero Fong Sai-Yuk. Even more strange was A Girl Fighter, starring Taiwanese martial arts diva Polly Shang-Kuan.

Kuan had gotten her start in the wuxia genre in the late 1960s with films like Dragon Inn and Swordsman of All Swordsman. She stayed generally busy throughout the 1970s until her career waned in the final year of the decade. In any case, she was a prominent figure during the Basher Period, stuck around for the coming of Shapes, was there for the resuscitation of wuxia pian in the late 1970s, and even delved a little into Brucesploitation (in films like Magnum Fist). What makes A Girl Fighter unique is that it certainly feels like a wuxia pian (especially with its Ming Dynasty setting), but much of the fighting is open-handed, and yet it doesn’t quite reach Basher levels of crudeness in terms of choreography.

The movie begins with a couple enjoying some peaceful time together…until the unheralded arrival of a scoundrel named Chin Teng-Chiao (Luo Bin, of Swordsman at Large and Wang Yu, King of Boxers). Chin Teng-Chiao is the son of the richest and most influential man in town, so the little butthole thinks he can do whatever he wants, such as raping the daughter-in-law of the Liu family patriarch. When she puts up a struggle and her In-Laws step in to defend her, Chin just kills the entire family and that’s that.

Well, not quite. The magistrate, Hsu Chung-Huan (Ko Hsiang-Ting, of Struggle for a Vengeance and Fists for Revenge), and his advisor (Lui Ming, of Lightning of Bruce Lee and The Female Chivalry), have received an order from the capital to bring Chin Teng-Chiao in to be judged for his crimes. The problem is that this particular city does not have an actual police force. One assumes that law and order was maintained via private security funded by Chin Zhan-Peng. And since one assumes that Chin will not give up his son, the question of “Who will take responsibility for the job?” arises.

The question is answered by the arrival of a young lady named Sima Muyong (Polly Shang Kuan, of Seven to One and The 18 Bronzemen). Sima offers to bring in Chin Teng-Chiao. After dispatching a quartet of the magistrate’s guards in a display of her martial prowess, Magistrate Hsu figures that she’s as good an option as any other and gives her the job. It doesn’t take long for Sima to track Chin Teng-Chiao to a brothel and interrupt his merrymaking with a prolonged kung fu thrashing. She ultimately arrests him and takes him into custody.

But that is where things get complicated. Elder Chin (Tsao Chien, of Dragon Gate Swordsman and Chinese Kung Fu and Acupuncture) initially sends his flunkies to bribe the magistrate into letting his son go. But the issue has already reached the Top Brass, so even if Magistrate Hsu wanted to, there’d be no getting around that. However, the trial will not be held in town, but in the city of Zhending, which is located a few towns over and across the Black River. That means that Elder Chin has more than enough opportunities to ambush Sima Muyong and her men as they transport their prisoner through the countryside. And even if they do get that far, an attack by Chin’s men on the magistrate’s hall results in the theft of the Official Stamp, which means that Sima Muyong will have no way to prove who she is once (and if) she arrives.

Sima is undaunted, however, and soon takes the journey with six guards on her team. They are waylaid in the forest by Chin’s men, led by Chen Tianba (Chan Wai-Lau, of Showdown and The Fearless Hyena). They almost lose Junior Chin in the scuffle, but he is picked up by a wandering swordsman named Keng Tan-Hsin (Roc Tien, of The Samurai and The Tongfather). We later learn that Keng is the nephew of Liu Patriarch, and wants to kill Chin Teng-Chiao himself. But before he can do that, another entity shows up and steals Chin Junior. This new guy is Dong Qiming (Miao Tian, of Chivalrous Robber Lee San and Crazy Nuts of Kung Fu), a member of the guard from the destination town. He also wants to ensure that Chin arrives safely to his trial. In any case, they eventually all meet up an inn in the next town. It isn’t long, however, before Ching Zhan-Peng and his men have the entire place surrounded.

If you watch enough of these films like I do, you end up surprised when you see connections that you never saw before. For instance, the 1977 wuxia movie Green Dragon Inn is essentially a remake of A Girl Fighter. And that film also starred Polly Shang Kuan Ling Feng. There was a bit of a role reversal: Yueh Hua played the heroic captain and Polly Kuan played the vengeful niece of the murdered family, but the story for both films is essentially identical, including a prolonged sequence of the good guys and the prisoner trapped in an inn by the bad guys. The main difference is, like the title implies, this is Polly Shang-Kuan’s movie through and through. In Green Dragon Inn, she had to share the screen with genre veterans Yueh Hua and Lo Lieh. Here, she dominates practically every fight sequence there is, and the film is better for it.

The action was staged by Pan Yao-Kun, best known for the other half of the duo that gave us A Touch of Zen. He was pretty busy in Taiwanese cinema during the late 60s and early 70s, although he seemed to get less work as guys like Tommy Lee, Alan Chui, Robert Tai and Chan Muk-Chuen rose to prominence. He did make something of a comeback in the 1980s, even contributing to the superior action sequences of Young Hero of Shaolin 2. He does some okay work here, probably superior to the fights he did in Polly Kuan’s Rider of Revenge the previous year.

The action is mainly made up on group melees, often with the characters fighting with swords, with the exception of Polly, who mainly uses her bare hands. By this point, Polly had gotten her black belts in three different styles (karate, tae kwon do and judo) and it’s all on display here. Her blocks, punches and kicks are all performed with crispness. I could see the age yuke (high block) and moves that I myself performed back when I did karate. The fighting is interesting, because part of it is typical wuxia sword-slinging stuff, but then you have all these empty-handed fights as the title implies. This was pretty rare for a film with a wuxia setting back in 1972. And the moves and techniques are more genuine than the film’s basher contemporaries, so A Girl Fighter does feel like an outlier. The main problem with the action is that it is performed a bit slow: some of the speed and intensity that you’d find in the best bashers of that era is lost in favor of giving Polly Kuan’s skills a proper demonstration. The other problem with the action is Roc Tien (as usual), who is okay when he’s wielding a sword, but clumsy looking when he’s not. But there’s enough pure unadulterated Polly on display that I’m willing to forgive Roc’s awkwardness and Pan Yao-Kun’s lack of intensity with the hand-to-hand choreography.

Revenge in the Tiger Cage (1976)

Revenge in the Tiger Cage (1976)
Aka: Girls in the Tiger Cage 2; Woman Prisoner No. 407 2; Return to Tiger Cage; Operation First-Team
Original Title: 여수 407호 2
Translation: Female Prisoner 407 Part 2

 

Starring: Chen Hung-Lieh, Karen Yip Leng-Chi, Shen Yi, Kao Chiang, Chang Pei-Shan, Lee Wan-Chung, Jin Bong-Jin, Kim Wang-Guk, Kim Ki-Beom, Heo Jin
Director: Shin Sang-ok

 

Revenge in the Tiger Cage is the pseudo-direct sequel to Girls in the Tiger Cage, although some reviews I’ve read suggest that it fudges the details on where the first one ends and this one begins. It is also a colossally BORING entry in the Women in Prison, almost like an attempt to make a PG (albeit 1970s PG) version of the sort of sordid film that New World and the Italians were making at the same time.

The movie begins with Kuan Mou-Hua (Karen Yip, of The House of 72 Tenants and The 14 Amazons) already on the outside. She’s on the run with her fellow inmate, Kao Chuan-Tze (Heo Jin, who apparently helped write the Bruce Le film Enter the Game of Death). After enjoying a nice bath together in the wild, they find the house of Mou-Hua’s uncle. Unfortunately, the uncle and his wife have been murdered by the Japanese, leaving their young son to fend for himself. Before they can do anything, the Japanese show up and arrest Mou-Hua and Chuan-Tze. We never hear about the little kid again, so I assume the poor dude dies of starvation.

Mou-Hua and Chuan-Tze are put on trial not only for escaping from prison, but for murdering a man. Apparently in the first film, at some point Mou-Hua boarded a train and stabbed a guy to death. Up against the death penalty, Mou-Hua tells the story of her being framed (in the first film) and subsequent humiliation at the prison at the hands of Warden Kato (Chen Hung-Lieh, of Duel with Samurai and The Invincible Sword). She also says that the guy she killed was not only the one who framed her, but he had murdered her brother as well. This is enough to convince the judges to give her and Chuan-Tze life sentences…at the same prison they escaped from.

On their way back to the prison, Mou-Hua and Chuan-Tze almost die when the truck drivers try to push the vehicle off a cliff. There we learn that Kato wants them dead, as her testimony has drawn the attention of the authorities, who want to investigate him for abuse of power. So, now he needs to find a reason to kill the two girls. His first idea is to have the Queen Bee (Shen Yi, playing the same role from the first film) convince Mou-Hua to try to escape again. That way, Kato will have a reason for his guards to shoot her dead. However, Mou-Hua just wants to be a model prisoner and serve her sentence in peace. His next idea is to gather some of the girls in his office and then leave…with the keys in the door. Although the girls definitely contemplate escaping, Mou-Hua convinces them to stay.

Kato then goes for a more devious strategy. First, he cuts off the water from the latrines, which means the girls can’t shower. He then has his guards inform them that the water tower is too dirty and tell them they have to clean it up. As they’re cleaning the sludge out of the gigantic tower, tensions grow until a fight breaks out. Kato has all the women return to their quarters…except Mou-Hua and Chuan-Tze. As soon as they finish cleaning it, the guards remove the ladder and start filling it with water again. The two girls almost drown, but make it out alive and turn the tables on Kato, almost killing him.

A few days later, a fire starts in the prisoners’ quarters while a pair of them are engaging in lesbian coupling. Kato lets the fires burn, only releasing a handful of prisoners. Those prisoners release some of the others, but the fire ends up burning down one of the blocks, killing some 18 prisoners, including Chuan-Tze. At that point, an inspection team shows up at the prison to investigate Kato. He is eventually relieved of his post and a new warden is put in charge. His top security officer is also a member of the Japanese secret police. But one of the guards is part of the Korean resistance…

Much like Girls in the Tiger Cage, this film sets up moments of sleaze and then fails to follow through on them. There are multiple bathing sequences, women forced to disrobe (and jump), and lesbian sex, but are all filmed in a manner that the actual nudity is not visible (save a few bare bums). There are a few escape attempts, including one involving Mou-Hua being hidden in a coffin and then clawing her way out of the dirt to the surface. I think that scene was the inspiration for a similar one we saw in Kill Bill Vol. 2. But really, there is no real action, save a neverending chase sequence at the end involving a pair of handcars. Chen Hung-Lieh is not a particularly imposing villain here and comes across as an incompetent boob (the only boob in the film, if you catch my drift) for the most part. But with no martial arts, no gunplay, and no exploitation, Revenge in the Tiger Cage is simply a long slog to get through.

Shadow Killers Tiger Force (1986)

Shadow Killers Tiger Force (1986)
Aka: Ninja: The Shadow Killer; Shadow Killer
Original Footage: Girls in the Tiger Cage (여수 407호, South Korea, 1976)

 

Starring: Wayne Archer, Deborah Grant, Danny Raisebeck, Kenneth Smyth, Sun Chien, Chang Seng-Kwong, Poon Cheung, Karen Yip Leng-Chi, Shen Yi, Chen Hung-Lieh, Jin Bong-jin, Kim Ki-joo, Lee Wan-Chung, Seo Mi-gyeong, Heo Jin
Director: Cheng Kei-Ying, Shin Sang-ok
Action Director: (for new scenes) Chiang Tao

 

Shadow Killers Tiger Force is another cut-n-splice ninja picture brought to you by Tomas Tang and the “good” people at Filmark. Yup, the same blokes who gave us Ninja in the Killing Fields and The Jaguar Project are up to their old tricks again, taking movies from all over Asia (and SE Asia) and inserting cheaply-filmed footage of Caucasian actors dressing up as ninja. This one is interesting, because the ninja footage (set in the modern day) is tacked on to a WW2-era Women-in-Prison flick from South Korea called Girls in the Tiger Cage. Moreover, the original movie was directed by the infamous (and legitimately famous) Shin Sang-ok.

Shin (also known as Simon Sheen) was a super-important South Korean film director during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, his works shaped the landscape of Korean movies throughout the 1970s. During the early 1980s, Shin and his ex-wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, were kidnapped by North Korean agents at the command of dictator Kim Jong-il. Kim was a famous fan of cinema, especially Hollywood (despite the fact that regular North Korean citizens cannot partake of foreign media under threat of imprisonment or death). He wanted Shin Sang-ok to make movies for him in North Korea. Most famously, he made the giant monster movie Pulgasari (which also featured FX work from the Japanese crew at Toho, including Teruyoshi Nakano).

I won’t go too far into Shin’s story, although it is worthy of its own movie. Shin and Choi were able to escape from their guards while attending a film festival in Europe, where they took a taxi to the American embassy. They defected to America, where Shin was able to find work in Hollywood. He produced a children’s film called The Adventures of Galgameth, a remake of his own Pulgasari. He also directed The 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up and produced its follow-up: 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. He and Choi were eventually repatriated into South Korea, where he spent his final years.

This cut n’ paste piece of ninjasploitation cheese starts with a bunch of Chinese people at a park getting kidnapped by ninja assassins. Actually, they kill the men and run off with the women. At one point, they break up a kung fu demonstration by former Venom Mob troupe member Sun Chien (The Five Deadly Venoms and The Plot) and kill him (unlike Instant Rage and Ninja in the Killing Fields, Sun Chien actually gets to fight a little). One of their kidnapping victims is Sylvia (Karen Yip, whose character in Girls in the Tiger Cage was named Kuan Mo-Hua), the daughter of a rich Caucasian guy (Kenneth Smythe, of Ninja’s Extreme Weapons and War City 3: The Extreme Project). Rich Caucasian Guy hires a female (and white) ninja named Jenny (Deborah Grant, of Vampire Raiders: Ninja Queen and Aces Go Places V) to infiltrate the ninja prisoner camp and free Sylvia. Oh, and the ninjas work for a dangerous man (Wayne Archer, of Bionic Ninja and Golden Ninja Invasion) who plans on selling the girls as white slaves to buyers all over the world.

Most of the ensuing film is taken from Girls in the Tiger Cage, only stopping for a few minutes here and there to show Jenny “watching” Sylvia’s interactions with her fellow inmates. Also, Tomas Tang and company do the thing where they have characters from both sets of footage have a conversation (despite different sets and backdrops), mainly in the case of Wayne Archer and the evil lecherous prison warden, played by perennial 1970s villain Chen Hung-Lieh (Cub Tiger from Hong Kong and Chivalrous Robber Lee San). Initially, Sylvia is the target of the Queen Bee inmate, played by Shen Yi (of Cave of Silken Web and The Angel Strikes Again). The two are at each other’s throats until Sylvia rescues the girl from a rock slide during forced labor—which includes both mining and running a sweatshop. Sylvia tries to escape numerous times (via the sewer, hiding in cafeteria waste, etc.), although each attempt ends in her re-capture and subsequent torture. She eventually escapes via helicopter, robbing the head ninja (Wayne Archer) of a girl to sell to sheiks in the Middle East. Girls in the Tiger Cage must set some sort of record for setting up the most opportunities for sleaze—including two group bath sequences and a sex scene between the Warden and a female inmate--and then pointedly not showing anything. The violence is tame. The torture is tame. Most of the nudity is covered by the actresses’ arms. This is definitely Vanilla WiP filmmaking.

The movie ends with one of the most goofy and over-the-top finales ever seen…in any movie. Jenny the Ninja faces off with the head ninja. It starts off with your basic katana battle, although Chiang Tao’s choreography is very much staged more like a Chinese sword fight than anything you’d see in Japanese martial arts. The two combatants then travel through a solid wall (a lá Kitty Pryde of the X-Men) into a house, where Jenny suddenly appears in belly dancer gear and starts performing a hypnotic dance of seduction. Once she has him where she wants him, she slices off his head with a whip…but the head re-attaches itself. They use their smoke bombs to teleport back into the woods, where they continue fighting. Sylvia’s father show up and pump his body completely full of lead. But he’s still not dead. Sylvia takes an RPG, writes a Taoist spell on it with her blood, and then one of the dad’s men fires it from a bazooka. Evidently, Taoist spells are capable of transforming rocket-propelled grenades into super-intelligent heat-seeking missiles. The rocket follows the guy around for several minutes, finally detonating when it traps him in a house. The end.

What? Do you need an analysis after reading that final paragraph?

The Bamboo House of Dolls (1973)

Bamboo House of Dolls (1973)
Chinese Title: 女集中營
Translation: Women’s Concentration Camp

 

Starring: Lo Lieh, Birte Tove, Wang Hsieh, Lee Hye-Sook, Terry Liu, Got Ping, Jin Bong-Jin, Roska Rosen, Niki Wane, Na Ha-yeong, Ko Sang-Mi
Director: Kuei Chih-Hung
Action Director: Luk Chuen (credited as “Shikamura”)

 

Bamboo House of Dolls is my first “Women in Prison” (or WiP) film. I don’t know a whole lot about the genre to be able to comment on it, so I’ll defer my introduction to El Santo of “1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.” In his review of The Big Doll House (1971), he writes[1]:

 

“Of all the common breeds of exploitation movie, the New World-style women’s prison flick most invites easy ideological pigeonholing as sexist trash, but it resists that dismissal with the very same breath. For the fact is that the women’s prison movie as codified by The Big Doll House calls upon the audience to identify with the parties on both sides of the bars simultaneously. Yes, we are cued to take pleasure in the inmates’ torments, to see them as objects for the most sadistic whims of the male id. But at the same time— and in stark contrast to the white slavery roughies— there’s no question but that the prisoners are the heroes of these films, whose rebellion we await more longingly with each new violation. Furthermore, the entire genre is pervaded by a post-countercultural mistrust of authority. The treatment meted out to the protagonists and their cellmates is almost always wildly disproportionate to the crimes for which they were incarcerated— if in fact the prisoners are even guilty of crimes at all. And the prison officials are invariably personally villainous as well as representative of a corrupt regime. In the end, no other genre strives so hard to make men root for women in revolt against an unjust system, and while that may not exactly be feminist in and of itself, it isn’t exactly regressive, either.”

 

As was the style of the time, Bamboo House of Dolls is set some time during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 – 1945), which is essentially the name given to World War II as fought in China against the Japanese occupiers. The movie opens with an injured man going into a house and trying to send a message via telegraph. Before he can finish his message, Japanese soldiers break in and mow the man down in a rain of gunfire. His wife, Hong Yu-Lan (Korean actress Lee Hye-sook), is arrested in the confusion. At the same time, the soldiers storm a Christian Red Cross hospital (staffed by pretty Euro babes) looking for a downed American pilot. They start executing patients until the pilot reveals himself, whom they murder on the spot. The soldiers then arrest the nurses and (presumably) kill the rest of the patients…because you know, Japanese atrocities and WW2.

So, let’s meet the five prisoners we’ll spend the movie with. We already talked about Hong Yu-Lan. Besides being the wife of a member of the Chinese resistance, her importance to the story is that her husband revealed to her the location of stolen Japanese gold (which in turn was stolen from Chinese banks) that the Resistance wants to buy arms with. However, she took the butt of a rifle to the head before her arrest, so her memory of its location is a bit fuzzy. There’s the head nurse from the hospital, Jennifer (Birte Tove, of The Sexy Girls of Denmark), who is more or less the main character of them all. She is joined by two other nurses: Mary (Roska Rosen), the shy blonde, and Elizabeth (Niki Wane), the more sex-starved of the group. There is also a blind girl named Hu Lizhu (Korean actress Ko Sang-mi). The five are later joined by a female student named Wang Xia (another Korean actress, Na Ha-yeong).

The first days in the camp are characterized by all sorts of nasty business. One day, they are forced to watch (and participate in) the deadly whipping of a fellow inmate (Dana, of Super Infra-Man and Image of Bruce Lee). There is also a food fight in the mess hall that devolves into an all-out cat brawl. Our five heroines are also raped by the higher ups. The entire film stops for this unpleasant sequence. Hu Lizhu is poked with a katana and forced to walk on broken glass, after which she’s raped on top of the glass. An officer tries to rape Hong Yu-Lang, but her robotic, emotionless demeanor is a real turn-off for the guy, so he sleeps with the sex-starved Elizabeth instead. Mary is the target of Security Officer Mako (Terry Liu, of Super Infra-Man and The Dragon Lives Again), who rapes her with a porcelain dildo until she comes to like it. The head of the camp, Commander Inouye (Wang Hsieh, of Master of Kung Fu and Virgins of the 7 Seas), sets his sights on Jennifer, although she resists his attempts to violate her.

It takes about 50 minutes or so for the actual plot to start. You see, the camp’s cook, Zhang (Jin Bong-jin, of The Heroic Ones and All Men are Brothers), is actually a member of the Resistance. He informs Hong Yu-Lan and she plans with Elizabeth and the others an escape. While they are escaping, Zhang attacks some guards, goes into the engine room, and cuts off the camp’s power. That allows the girls (and Zhang) to make it past the electric fence. They are eventually cut off by the Japanese, who kill Zhang and take the girls back to camp…for more torture and unpleasantness. But now Jennifer knows that there is a spy among them…and that there’s another ally of theirs among the Japanese officers: Captain Cui (Lo Lieh, of Five Fingers of Death and The Chinese Boxer).

It goes without saying that Bamboo House of Dolls is a seriously sleazy film. The first half finds every excuse possible to show us bare breasts, from gratuitous group showers to girls getting their clothes ripped off during cat fights. Mary gets raped no less than twice, but each time she grows to like the sex; later it is implied that she is regularly sleeping with Mako and getting favors from her. And even in the second half, when the plot starts moving, there are several scenes of the women being tortured. In one of them, a wooden bar is placed across a sitting Jennifer’s upper legs, while her feet are placed upon wooden blocks. Blocks are added to that the height of her legs causes the bar to press down on her femur.

The last twenty minutes or so consist of a series of action scenes as the girls must escape from the camp itself, make their way through the wilderness, and then deal with the traitor once the gold is found. There is also an extensive battle between the Chinese Resistance and the Japanese soldiers, which is literally broadswords versus bayonets. That sequence was choreographed by Luk Chuen, the Chinese name for Japanese actor and martial artist Yasuyoshi Shikamura. He was one of the few Japanese imports in Hong Kong cinema to become an action director in addition to an actor. There is also some girl-fu at the end. As much as I like that sort of thing, it is hardly cathartic given the treatment the girls have endured up to this point. In the best tradition of Hong Kong cinema, anyone can die at any time in these movies, and that goes doubly true for Bamboo House of Dolls. This is definitely not a movie for the weak of heart.

 

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[1] - http://1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsa-d/bigdollhouse.htm