2 Capsule Reviews - The "Yam Can Kill" Series

The Cyprus Tigers (1990) 

Starring: Simon Yam, Conan Lee, Collin Cheung, Phillip Ko Fei, Joey Wong, Robin Shou, Luk Chuen, Winston Ellis, Sophia Crawford
Director: Phillip Ko Fei
Action Director: Luk Chuen (Yasuyoshi Shikamura), 

Released on VHS in the late 1990s as part of the "Yam Can Kill" series--the others being Mission Kill and Killer's Romance (see review below). I've yet to read anything remotely positive about this film, from Asian Cult Cinema to "View from the Brooklyn Bridge". So, I took it as a challenge.

On the island of Cyprus, the local police force employs a trio of Chinese immigrants, who are known on the force as "The Cyprus Tigers." They are: Rick (Simon Yam, of Bullet in the Head and Hitman); Bob (Conan Lee, of Tiger on the Beat and Ninja in the Dragon's Den); and Alan, or "Kid" (Collin Cheung Chi-Tak, of Angel's Mission and Fatal Termination). They are the both the biggest hotshots and goof-offs of the force. The film opens with them foiling a hostage situation by having Bob taking their own police chief hostage and confusing the bad guys.

Anyway, after a few random asides involving a nude beach (lots of bare breasts here) and a gag involving an attempt to get Bob to pay for everyone's expensive dinner (makes sense in context), the film settles down for a story, such as it is. The three are assigned to a case to bust some counterfeiters, who are working for the town's stand-out citizen, Mr. King (Phillip Ko Fei, of The Fearless Dragons and too many low-budget films of the 1990s). They lose the counterfeit plates during the bust, which gets the chief on their back. They try to bust Mr. King's bodyguard (Winston Ellis, of Operation Condor), but that leads to Rick and Bob being held at gunpoint and ordered to undress each other--which leads the bad guys to take the security tape and release it as a bestselling gay porno movie.

Rick and Bob are suspended. Rick goes back to Hong Kong to try to patch things up with his ex-wife, Joey (Joey Wong, of A Chinese Ghost Story and The East is Red). Bob gets in trouble with the law when Mr. King's men murder some tart whom he'd gone home with and frame him for the killing. Mr. King overplays his hand when he sends his girlfriend (Sophia Crawford, of Beauty Investigator and U.S. Seals II) to Hong Kong to (unsuccessfully) eliminate Rick. Rick goes back to Cyprus and convinces his boss to let Bob out in order to bust Mr. King and find evidence of his counterfeiting activities.

Most of the film is very dumb comedy, like watching Conan Lee and Collin Cheung walk around the police station with baseball caps that have a mouth with a tongue on it and one with female breasts sculpted on it, respectively. The bad guys are not intimidating, even when they bring in a pair of supposedly crazy Japanese criminals (action director Luk Chuen and a young Robin Shou) to help his operation. The Japanese characters are depicted as being racist against blacks (i.e. Winston Ellis). Conan Lee's hothead cop is annoying and basically unlikeable. And the subplot involving Joey Wong is more filler than anything else.

Some of this may be forgivable if there was more and better action. The fight choreography was provided by Luk Chuen (aka Yasuyoshi Shikamura, whose action direction credits include A Boxer's Omen and Bamboo House of Dolls). It's actually not all that bad, but the problem is that the fights are all short and tend to end before they even begin. Among the fights, we get: Conan Lee vs. Winston Ellis and a roomful of goons; Robin Shou vs. Winston Ellis; Simon Yam vs. Sophia Crawford; Conan Lee vs. Luk Chuen; Simon Yam vs. Robin Shou; Simon Yam vs. Winston Ellis; Conan Lee vs. Robin Shou; and Simon Yam vs. Phillip Ko. It is pretty clear that Simon Yam is being doubled for much of his fights. His throwdown with Winston Ellis is undercranked (purposely) to the point of absurdity. The final throwdown between Robin Shou and Conan Lee is disappointingly one-sided in favor of the latter.

The film's ending is surprisingly somber given the film's tone overall. But all things considered, this is only for completists of the filmographies of Conan Lee, Simon Yam, or Robin Shou.

Killer's Romance (1990)

Starring: Simon Yam, Joey Wong, Phillip Ko Fei, Luk Chuen, Lau Siu-Ming, Foo Wong-Tat, Ishida Kenichi
Director: Phillip Ko Fei
Action Director: Luk Chuen (Yasuyoshi Shikamura), Wong Coh-Wah

Phillip Ko's low-budget action films--well, mainly Final Run, seemed to do well enough around the turn of the 1980s that he was able to scrounge up enough money to film abroad. One of those was the dire Cyprus Tigers, which wasted a great cast on unfunny comedy and an unlikable lead (Conan Lee). Surprisingly, it did okay at the box office. Then there is this film, the low-budget answer to Clarence Ford and Tsui Hark's Dragon from Russia: a loose adaptation of the popular manga "The Crying Freeman".

The movie opens with Jeffrey (Simon Yam, of Sha Po Lang and Exiled) coming back to London following the murder of his father (Foo Wang-Tat, of A Better Tomorrow III and An Eye for an Eye). His dad was one of the heads of the Yamada Gumi crime syndicate, which means that violent revenge is an acceptable response. According to his dad's top lieutenant, Yoshikawa (Luk Chuen, of City Cops and Ninja Over the Great Wall), his dad was murdered by the Chinatown triads of London, under the command of Ma Tin (Lau Siu-Ming, of Swordsman and A Chinese Ghost Story).

So, Jeffrey goes on a mission of revenge, killing the top three leaders of the gang, including Ma Tin himself. While committing one of the murders, he is witnessed by Paula (Joey Wong, of A Chinese Ghost Story III and An Eternal Combat), a dance student in London who is also an amateur photographer. She manages to photograph Jeffrey and becomes mildly obsessed with him. They (coincidentally) run into each other after another killing, which leads to both the police, represented by a Chinese detective (Siu Yuk-Lung), and the Triads to think that Paula is in cahoots with Jeffrey.

The Triads, now led by Charlie (Phillip Ko Fei, of Eight Diagram Pole Fighter and Shaolin Intruders), show up at Paula's house and a huge gunfight breaks out. Paula is injured and Jeffrey goes into hiding. Meanwhile, we learn that both Charlie and Yoshikawa had Jeffrey's father killed so that he would wipe out Charlie's bosses and the two could rise to the top of their respective gangs. The only loose ends left are Jeffrey and Paula, and sooner or later the latter will lead the bad guys to the former.

I'm admittedly not familiar with the source material for "The Crying Freeman" or its accompanying anime--I've only seen Dragon from Russia and that very well may have been unsubbed, too. That said, I'm not really sure what the similarities are between Killer's Romance and the manga. Perhaps it deals with Japanese assassins and mobsters and a guy is supposed to kill a female witness to his activities, but falls in love with her instead? I'll let more educated people school me on that.

The movie was shot entirely in London--or at least it looks to have been, so I'm guessing that ate up much of the budget and left less money for explosive action sequences. It does feel more like a real movie than a lot of low-budget Phillip Ko opuses (opera?), with a beginning, middle, and end, a greater emphasis on characters, and a decent attempt to add genuine stakes to the action. It is also brutal and unforgiving, even to characters who might normally hold plot armor if Hollywood tried to do the same thing. So, I will applaud attempts to be legitimately dramatic over some of the lulls in story.

Simon Yam plays his character with limited dialog. Not John Wick level of "limited," but there are a lot of scenes where he does more acting with his eyes and facial expressions than with his mouth. Joey Wong is Joey Wong: lovely, adorable, and someone you just want to give a SMOOSHY hug to. And despite the unlikelihood of a normal girl falling for a sociopathic killer, one only need to remember the worldwide popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey to know how popular that sort of thing is. I would say that Phillip Ko often overplays his Charlie character, especially during a scene where he's getting a bullet extracted from him, in a way that takes away from the film's otherwise serious tone.

The action was choreographed by Luk Chuen (Yasuyoshi Shikamura) and Wong Coh-Wah (billed as "Panther Wong"). Much of the action is made up of gunplay, which is fairly well staged. The big shootout at Charlie's house is a definitely highlight, with all the carnage and "shooting guns in the air" that we would expect from a vintage John Woo movie. I'm just surprised that, given the size of the pistols that Simon Yam uses in that scene, he wasn't taking off entire heads and limbs with those babies.

The martial arts are limited to the last 20 minutes or so. There is a nice fight between Simon Yam and some Japanese assassins sent to take him out, led by Ishida Kenichi (Final Run and Drugs Fighters). Ishida is an excellent kicker--he even recreates the jump-over-the-table spinning side kick that Casanova Wong did in Warriors Two--and I wish we could've seen more of him in Hong Kong cinema. The film ends with an extended, two-part sword fight between Jeffrey and his fellow Yamada Gumi members, capped off with very good throwdown (with katana) between Simon Yam and Luk Chuen--this was included in the now-defunct Wasted Life's Top 100 Fight Scenes of All Time. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it goes a long way to justify the film's earlier pacing issues.

2 Capsule Reviews - Late-Period Shaw Films

Secret Service of the Imperial Court (Hong Kong, 1984: Tony Lou)
Chinese Title: 錦衣衛
Translation: Jinyiwei (Embroidered Uniform Guard)

Starring: Leung Kar-Yan, Lau Wing, Nancy Hu Kuan-Chen, Ku Feng, Lo Meng, Lo Lieh, Eric Chan Ga-Kei, Lau Yuk-Pok, Fong Yi-Jan, Phillip Ko Fei
Director: Tony Lou
Action Director: Tony Lou, Tong Gwok-Gei

Late-period Shaw film set in the late Ming Dynasty about the Jinyiwei, or Ming Dynasty secret police. The current emperor is a useless lecher, thanks to the Eunuch Wang Chun (Lau Wing). Wang Chun has cleverly "suppressed" the Emperor's power by keeping the young man supplied with a constant supply of female flesh, allowing him to run the Jinyiwei and eliminate his enemies and the true Ming patriots. The Guard is run by Zhao Wuyi (Ku Feng) and the captain of the guard is his son, Zhao Bufa (Leung Kar-Yan). Zhao Bufa begins to question the necessity of murdering different generals who are faithful to the emperor and, when he begins to spare them, finds himself at odds with the Eunuch, his fellow guardsmen, and even his own family.

Said to be the basis of 14 Blades, this is a much superior movie with a stronger emotional core, even if it gets extremely bleak. I'm guessing that the general sentiment at the Shaw Brothers at the time was that of despondency and desperation, which also showed up in 8 Diagram Pole Fighter. A lot of innocent people die and people are placed in awful situations where their capacity for humanity is stretched to the breaking point. And people are thrown into awful dilemmas, such as "Is justice worth enough to sacrifice an entire family?"

The fights were staged by the director himself (who also choreographed the Bastard Swordsman films) and Tong Gwok-Gei (The Big Sting). The action is mainly swordplay and all of it is well staged. Sun Chien shows up as one Bufa's colleagues and gets to fight Beardy with swords and shuriken. Lo Meng plays Beardy's brother, but don't expect much fighting from him. But yeah, the fights are good, but man, this film is really gory. Expect lots of blood geysers, severed limbs, and even someone getting split in half right down the middle. I'm sure the graphic violence will stick out more than the choreography itself.

New Tales of the Flying Fox (Hong Kong, 1984: Lau Shut-Yue) -
Chinese Title: 新飛狐外傳
Translation: The New Flying Fox Chronicles

Starring: Alex Man, Kara Hui Ying-Hung, Felix Wong, Tai Liang-Chun, Ku Kuan-Chung, Leung Kar-Yan, Lau Yuk-Pok, Michael Tong, Chan Sze-Kai, Chu Tit-Wo, Yuen Qiu
Director: Lau Shut-Yue
Action Director: Law Keung

Another wuxia pian from the latter years of the Shaw Brothers, this one based on the novel The Young Flying Fox, which was also the basis for The Sword of Many Lovers. This year also saw the Shaws producing (or releasing) The Hidden Power of the Dragon Sabre (also based on a Jin Yong novel) and Return of the Bastard Swordsman, based on a novel by Wong Ying. This one is notable in that much of the talent in front of the camera aren't really Shaw veterans (or at least not your usual headliners), nor are the director (his first film--he directed The Young Vagabond the following year) or the action director, Law Keung.

An opening narration introduces us to the two great heroes of the Qing Dynasty: Wu Yi-Dao (Leung Kar-Yan) and Miao Ren-Feng (Alex Man). Both men are not only supreme swordsman, but are also anti-Qing rebels. The Court decides to deal with them by buying out Miao's martial brother, Tian Guan-nung (Ku Kuan-Chung), who is having an affair with Ren-Feng's wife (Chan Sze-Kai). Tian goads the men into having a duel. They fight to a draw and are interrupted by Wu Yi-Dao's wife (Yuen Qiu) going into labor. While Yi-Dao and Ren-Feng are exchanging martial arts pointers--which Yi-Dao's wife draws and places in a book--Guan-nun poisons Ren-Feng's sword, which results in Wu Yi-Dao's demise and his wife committing suicide.

A guy whom Yi-Dao had rescued earlier (Lam Fai-Wong) rescues the baby Wu Fei and takes him into the forest to raise him and lets him learn kung fu from the manual his mom had made. Wu Fei grows up to be played by Felix Wong (the guy Jackie Chan fights at the fish market in Drunken Master II). He meets Guan-nung and Ren-Feng's wife, who are on the lam for being adulterous bad people. Guan-nung tells Wu Fei and Miao Ren-Feng is the bad guy, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings and conflicts. He also meets a female martial artist named Yuen Ziyi (Kara Hui) who is on a mission to protect all of the regional martial artists from a trap set by the Qings. He also meets the "heiress" of the Poison Clan (or Medicine Clan), Ching Ling-Soo (Tai Liang-Chun), who helps him cure Miao Ren-Feng when he is blinded. Both her and Yuen fall in love with Wu Fei...

The movie movies at a swift pace, is never too convoluted, and the viewer is never far away from the next fight sequence. It does become a tragedy at the end thanks to the characters' visible flaws, although the final sacrifice comes out of nowhere and is so rushed that it'll probably make the viewers say "Huh?" more than "Awwwww!" The fight scenes are all well-staged, although they feel more like an early 1990s wuxia than an early 1980s one. There is a lot of wire-fu in this movie, which is actually staged quite well considering the modest filmography of Law Keung. Expect your average barrage of swords and sabre, plus a contingent of soldiers armed with rope-darts, Kara Hui armed with two-fisted daggers, and a bunch of a Lama monks armed with sharpened rings and monk's spades. The final showdown between the two heroes and the evil Tian Guan-Nung rests on the heroes using an empty-handed approach to fighting that is reminiscent of The Odd Couple.

The Boxer’s Omen (1983)

The Boxer’s Omen (1983)

Starring: Phillip Ko Fei, Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong, Wai Ka-Man, Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, Bolo Yeung Sze, Cheung Chok-Chow, Leung Hak-Shun
Director: Kuei Chih-Hung
Action Directors: Luk Chuen, Chu Ko

The Shaw Brothers were probably desperate to grasp any market share in the film industry by the time the 1980s rolled around. Lau Kar-Leung’s films were still generally doing well, but most of their other kung fu output (and most everything else) were struggling against Golden Harvest and Cinema City. They did find some degree of success in the horror genre and the totally nuts approach to graphic horror and overall weirdness extended into a lot of their late-period wuxia movies as well. Long story short: Shaw Brothers made a lot of crazy films during their final years.

One of them was a horror flick called Bewitched, which you might say was a spiritual successor to Ho Meng-Hua’s two Black Magic films (also made for the Shaws). That movie was a success, coming in at #6 among the Top 10 domestically-produced films that year. That was enough to greenlight a sequel, which came two years later. The Boxer’s Omen was that sequel and it ended up being most outrageous, (arguably) most disgusting, and just all-out bonkers horror film that the Shaw Brothers produced (although one might make an argument that Seeding of the Ghost deserves that distinction).

It takes a little while for us the viewer to find out how this and Bewitched are connected. The movie starts out at a kickboxing match between Chan Wing (Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, of Invincible Shaolin and Five Shaolin Masters) and a Thai fellow named Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung, of TC 2000 and Shootfighter). Although Chan Wing technically wins, Bu Bo pulls a dirty trick and attacks Chan from behind, doing some elbow and knee drops that ultimately break his neck, leaving his paralyzed. In Chan Wing’s corner is his brother, Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei, of The Loot and Shaolin Intruders). Chan Hung appears to be a boxer as well, in addition to a mid-level of Triad of sorts.

After finding out that Chan Wing will never walk again, Chan Hung decides to go to Thailand to challenge Bu Bo to a revenge match. But not before getting into some trouble with a Mainland gang vying for territory and then getting it on with his hot girlfriend (Wai Ka-Man, of Seeding of a Ghost and Rocky’s Love Affairs). The former point is interesting, because the gang gets the drop on him and the only thing that keeps his life is the magical intervention of a monk (Elvis Tsui Kam-Kong) whom Chan has never met before. The same monk visits him after his lovemaking session, although it appears only Chan can see him.

So, Chan heads to Thailand, where he barges in on a public event celebrating Bu Bo’s “victory”—amusingly enough, the spokesman for Muay Thai says that Bu was the rightful winner despite some prejudice from the Hong Kong referee. Yeah, okay. If you say so. Bu Bo gives Chan three months to prepare for the fight. One day, while sightseeing on the Mekong, Chan sees a Buddhist Temple. While those are a dime a dozen in the Asia, one of the arches is growing bright yellow, like he had seen in one of his visions. Intrigued, he visits the temple, where all of the monks know his name and somehow were expecting him. The head monk then explains the meaning of the visions.

The monk whom Chan Hung has been seeing is Qing Zhao, who was the monk that assisted Melvin Wong against the evil Thai sorcerer Magusu (Hussein Hassan) in Bewitched. When that film ended, Qing Zhao had destroyed Magusu with his Buddhist “white” magic and taken the little plush bat demon that emerged from his body. We then get a flashback sequence in which Qing Zhao performs a ritual to destroy the bat demon, which calls the attention of another Thai sorcerer, presumably Magusu’s superior. This guy performs a spell in which he mixes cobra venom with the preserved brains of a dead person and has a trio of oversized spiders (played by plush dolls) suck up the mixture. He then unleashes them on Qing Zhao, who kinda-sorta “dies.” The problem is that this spell not only is going to kill Qing Zhao, but it threatens to prevent him from achieving Enlightenment, upon which he is on the cusp.

So what does that have to do with Chan Hung? Apparently, he and Qing Zhao were twin brothers in another life so they have a karmic bond extending into this one. On one hand, Chan Hung is the only person who has the ability to defeat the sorcerer and save Qing Zhao from losing his chance at nirvana. On the other hand, that also means that if Qing Zhao dies from this black magic spell, Chan will die, too. Sorta unfair, isn’t it?

Chan Hung initially dismisses the story as a bunch of hokum and returns to Hong Kong. But shortly after he arrives, he has an episode in which he vomits an entire moray eel and decides that the monks may have a point after all. So, he returns to Thailand and agrees to become a monk in order to defeat the sorcerer…but will he be ready for the magical battle that awaits him? And when he learns that this new sorcerer has a trio of colleagues who are just as, if not more, talented?

The Boxer’s Omen is a phantasmagorical parade of the gory and gooey, with Chan Hung being unwillingly drawn into the Battle Between Good and Evil…between white magic and its opposite, sorcery of the blackest sort. It is a battle drenched in bodily fluids (especially vomit…oh, how much vomit is in this film) guaranteed to make almost the staunchest of viewers gag at one point. Ironically, the time I winced was when Phillip Ko Fei was slicing his own arm open in order to fill it with the Essence of Iron: that scene made me think of the uncomfortable Naked Blood film from Japan (shutters).

But beyond that, some feel that there is a spiritual side to the film, especially as the hero finds himself travelling to Kathmandu, Nepal. The main idea is about saving someone with whom you share a bond from a previous life and we learn a little more about the Monk Qing Zhao’s history of lives, including one as a Tibetan Lama. Part of the finale has Qing Zhao manifesting himself as the Lama from his previous life in order to fight their final foe: the Crocodile Witch. I’ll be honest though, I can see some people seeing a hint of spirituality in terms of the story being about one’s quest to guarantee another man’s salvation, but I think that ends up buried in knee deep in all the regurgitation, animal blood, slime, putrid brains, and everything else this film has on display.

I mean, this is a movie where a man stabs himself in the neck with a pair of needles and suddenly becomes a male version of the Penanggalan (from Mystics in Bali). This is a movie where a man bites the head off a chicken and spits the blood onto an army of crocodile skulls, which attack its opponent. This is a film where the characters kill a crocodile, remove its innards, stuff a dead body into it, and that body is reborn as a naked woman (full-frontal nudity and all)—although let me note here that the story never specifies if that body is of the one sorcerer who gets defeated and is being reborn as a man, or if it was of a female sorceress who needed to be resurrected anyway.

But with all the flying goblin heads and vomit-eating that defines the many magic sequences, everything else almost becomes unimportant. Yes, there are a pair of martial arts sequences (thanks to the bouts with Bolo Yeung), but they’re pretty standard and forgettable when compared to a man getting attacked by dozens of plush bats or a monk trying to kill a walking skeleton bat. There is a fair amount of full-frontal nudity—from both the reliable Wai Ka-Man and whomever plays the Crocodile Witch—although there is a good chance that the next disgusting magical ritual will be a total boner killer.

The Boxer’s Omen is recommended for Hong Kong cinephiles, although newbies may be put off from further explorations into HK horror if they have weak stomachs. This is for the gorehounds. The fans of the extreme. The ones who scoff at limp and weak PG-13 films made for teenie-boppers want something “real.” The sort of person who find the Terrifier movies to be endearing. The Boxer’s Omen is for the hardcore. It is not for the faint of heart.