PART ONE: A GOLDEN HARVEST
In this series I'll be looking at the root cause of all this obsessive compulsive behaviour, which is to say all of this movie madness. It will be more an examination of a now more than two decades old interest in international cinema and how it came to be, as opposed to the usual review format. Is this a bad idea? Yes, probably. But along the way it will of course have to include a few glances and the best choices from any given category or region and a few retrospective moments. How many parts of this will there be? It's hard to be certain. It will probably be a trilogy of four knowing how these things go; usually one that tests everyone's patience before the end. To begin let's take a cursory glance at the hair-raising world of Hong Kong action movies.
Late night television is often where unexpected genre addictions spring from and this is no exception. Although it tended to be an eclectic mixture of horror films being broadcast, there were other choices to be found occasionally. Fortune would also favour the action junkies out there in the 1990s whenever the Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon was being show. There were also times when a double feature of Jackie Chan's First Strike and the original Police Story could be found. The dubbing was a problem and the TV edits were sometimes worse, but catching the duel between Lee and Han or seeing Jackie jump to that lightbulb covered pole was unforgettable. It's true that there was a lot of derivative material but it didn't make any difference; these films showcased a kind of wow factor that was missing elsewhere.
Years later and these movies would see a new lease of life thanks to restored DVD releases. There were brand new commentaries and interviews. Best of all there was a way to see many more films like this. Bruce Lee's Game of Death could now be enjoyed for what it was; twenty minutes or so of finished material. It was incredible to see all the material shot and the butchered version from 1978 would no longer have to be suffered through. Less popular titles like Jackie's Dragon Lord and The Fearless Hyena were also accessible, despite occasionally mediocre offerings. Thanks to new home distribution deals it was now possible to see how things went between 1973 and 1979 when wannabe Bruce Lee vehicles were phased out and action comedy slapstick arrived.
Jackie Chan may not have written much of his book My Life In Action himself but it sets the stage pretty well, and the largely dramatised film Painted Faces by Alex Law makes a great companion. There was a film history to be discovered and the technology of the time was in my favour. Whether it was watching copies of Drunken Master borrowed from friends and delving into the whole of Jet Li's Once Upon a Time in China series, things had gone from zero to eleven pretty fast. Not only had a new disc format sprung up incredibly fast, but there were also rental services that could mail them out as fast as they could be watched. Michelle Yeoh, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao and many of their co-stars inside of Hong Kong and from abroad became familiar faces. Yuen Woo-Ping became far more than the guy who worked on The Matrix.
It wasn't just must-sees like Gordon Chan's Fist of Legend and Sammo's own Eastern Condors that became regular viewings. Thanks to online service recommendations and discussions on film forums the likes of Mr Vampire and Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain could be discovered. There were new thrills, new extremes and what seemed like entirely new genres waiting out there. How else to describe something like The Story of Ricky in which heads are smashed like melons and entrails are torn out and used as garottes? The lines between comedy, horror and martial arts were constantly warping. Perhaps so was my movie fuelled mind. Labels like Tartan Asia Extreme and Hong Kong Legends were not using hyperbole here; they offered exactly what was advertised.
Perhaps this wealth of newly available media stemmed from the release of Ang Lee's masterful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Whatever the reason I wasn't complaining. Its two leads became firm favourites, with movies like Magnificent Warriors and A Better Tomorrow finding their way into my personal playlist. Michelle Yeoh effortlessly carried her own star features and whether Chow Yun-Fat was credited as The God Of Gamblers or The Hot-Handed God of Cops, he also had charisma to spare. Thanks to the best of efforts John Woo and Corey Yuen another world of action had materialised. Everywhere I looked there was another branch of cinema whether it was scabrous thrillers like Ringo Lam's Full Contact or Lau Kar-Leung's absurd Tiger on the Beat. Where else could you see such creative bullet cameras and chainsaw duels?
There was even a whole range of so called girls-with-guns features starring regulars such as Joyce Godenzi, Moon Lee and Yukari Oshima. It might be almost impossible to remember which Devil or Angel titles matched which film, or which order the Yes, Madam! sequels are supposed to be in, but there was a seemingly endless supply of excitement available. No subgenre was overlooked, and even regulars like Cynthia Rothrock and Richard Norton made appearances in incredibly oddball releases like The Magic Crystal. There were wizard battles in Encounters of The Spooky Kind and Indiana Jones pastiches like Operation Condor. Feeling in the mood for a Wild West story, a movie about ninjas, or a remake of Running Scared you didn't know you needed? It's all here.
This is all without going into more traditional territory and watching movies about rival schools and competing Kung Fu styles. For every outlandish release that blended two or three genres there was always something like Odd Couple or Legend of a Fighter. They still had plenty of laughs but they often used the same stock sound effects and the same coastal road for the final battle. There was something comforting about the lack of budget at times, and the way recurring actors were just given new facial hair. The way 'The End' appeared so abruptly also became a favourite trope. Jackie and Sammo might have had their own production companies at the height of their powers, but it was always fun to go back to the early days where period pieces were still in demand.
I say all this without getting into the more well known films from Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow which came out during that same early 2000s period. It was an incredible few years to say the least. To be fair I haven't even started talking about Shaw Brothers films or where to start with Gordon Liu and Ti Lung. You'd have to watch The 36th Chamber and Avenging Eagle first of course, but saying more would potentially mean rambling on forever. Maybe I will have to take a look at Five Elements Ninjas for an upcoming ninja special; it's only a matter of time. These days things are slightly different in terms of what is out of print in this particular niche, at least at the time of writing, but 88 Films and Eureka have started to pick up the slack.
Things have never quite felt the same since the advent of streaming services. The mailed rental services are dead and the online discussion boards are long gone, but all of this stirred up an addiction for world cinema that can't be easily quelled. In part two perhaps I'll take a look at my memories of Japanese genre cinema in the wake of Battle Royale and Hideo Nakata's Ring, and how Tartan DVD fuelled my desire to watch so much blood soaked nightmare fuel. Trying to cover any large number of films by Takashi Miike is probably a doomed venture, but I'll see what I can go do from my own perspective. Until then!
