Point is, I don't know a lot about video games. It's just not a medium that I have ever gotten into. So I can't comment very authoritatively on anything that was made after, say, Crazy Climber, but I have never the less seen a lot of video game related movies. In fact, I've seen just about all of them. And while some video games really do have a rich enough mythology or back story to serve as a decent foundation for a movie (Resident Evil, Silent Hill -- even if you don't think the movies were good, the games at least provided enough meat for the framework), many others do not. Of course, that doesn't stop them from being made into movies anyway.

Such is the case with DOA. As best I can gather, DOA started life as a beach volleyball video game, with the hook that all the characters were hot cartoon chicks with tiny bikinis and huge tits, and you could somehow set the jiggle rate on their boobs. Then somehow the DOA games became fighting games, with the attraction being the same. The approach was twofold in its success. First, it was simple, sleazy titillation. I mean, hot chicks with bouncy boobs in tiny bikinis, engaging in lots of activities that require their jiggly parts to jiggle? What's not to like? Secondly, the games tap into the fundamental desire of just about all guys to, at least for a while, be a really hot chick. I'm pretty firm in my belief that most men harbor this fantasy, and I think nowhere is it more obvious than in the tendency of men to always play the hot chick character in a video game. Chun Li is nothing if not a symbol of ten million wanna-be gender-benders.

You can support or detract from my theory all you want, but what's most notable about DOA is that "hot chicks play volleyball and fight" as a plot is pretty much the single greatest plot ever invented and the sole reason the technology of cinema and video games was invented. Thousands of years of intellectual evolution and technological innovation has finally resulted in my ability to watch a movie with the plot, "hot chicks play volleyball and fight."

DOA the movie was directed by Hong Kong action director Cory Yuen, who has a track record that boasts more high points than low and who specializes in turning attractive women into on-screen kungfu bad-asses. Under his tutelage, Cynthia Rothrock, Joyce Godenzi, Michelle Yeoh, and Shannon Lee were all transformed into believable martial arts powerhouses (OK, Rothrock was already a kungfu powerhouse; he just figured out how best to choreograph her). And while Hsu Chi, Karen Mok, and Vicky Zhao may not have been 100% believable as ass-kicking superwomen, that doesn't change the fact that Yuen's So Close was completely awesome. Yuen is also one of the few Hong Kong directors to have a big hit as a director in the United States, that hit being the Luc Besson-produced The Transporter starring Jason Statham.

When news that there was going to be a DOA movie produced first hit cult film fandom, there was a lot of eye-rolling and "yeah, whatever, man" reaction. But when it was further revealed that Cory Yuen would be director, ears (among other things) pricked up and a lot of action film fans were suddenly a lot more willing to give the film a try, even if the inevitable PG-13 rating meant it would be all tease. If anyone was going to be able to direct a dumb fun "hot chicks play volleyball and fight" movie, it would be Cory Yuen.

So people waited. Trailers played, and the reaction was tentatively positive after the initial negative reaction. Sure, the movie looked colossally goofy, but it also looked like it would sport high energy and be a lot of fun. And then the release date came and went, and there was no movie. DOA vanished, bumped from the release schedule and shelved for any number of reasons, the most likely of which was probably, "Wow, this movie is awful." Which is a shame. I mean, how bad could the film possibly be? They released Norbit, for crying out loud, and Epic Movie. And those had to be worse than DOA which, if nothing else, at least would feature hot chicks playing volleyball and fighting.

DOA eventually began to trickle out to theaters in other countries, though it still remained absent from American theaters, and fans of Cory Yuen, action movies, video games, and hot chicks in bikinis started looking to foreign DVD releases to see the movie.

Was it worth the wait? Or the trouble to see it? Yes and no. DOA is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be from the elements listed above. It is dumb. Extremely dumb. It is full of cheap titillation and gratuitous bikini ass shots, which always gets the Teleport City seal of approval. The script is paper thin, and what little story there is makes no sense anyway. Most of the cast doesn't even seem to realize they are supposed to be acting in a movie. The fight choreography, involving almost no trained martial artists, is heavy on editing, camera trickery, and computer manipulation.

And yeah, it's all a whole lot of gloriously stupid fun.

The plot revolves around a group of women invited to compete in a semi-secret martial arts tournament where, of course, shady shenanigans are being engaged in behind the scenes. Enter the Dragon's plot has proved useful so many times, the writers of this film decided there was no reason not to dust it off one more time. We first meet Katsumi, head of a ninja clan with a massive temple complex you would think someone in modern-day Japan would notice. Katsumi's brother disappeared during the last tournament, presumed dead, and she is determined to uncover the truth behind his disappearance, even if it means violating the laws of her clan. She leaves for the tournament with two more ninjas in hot pursuit: the noble Hayabusa, who has a thing for Katsumi, and the vengeful Ayane, herself the former lover of Katsumi's brother.

Katsumi is played by the indescribable Devon Aoki, whose continued presence in the world of cinema is one of the great mysteries of the entertainment world. She's a horrible, horrible actress, completely incapable of anything beyond a single blank expression and a single, monotone style of dialog delivery. On top of that, she's pretty weird looking. How she ever got a part in a movie is beyond me, but how she continues to get parts, however small they may be and however bad the movies they are in may be, I simply can't explain. And despite all that, I kind of like her. Not in a way where I'd go, "Oh, hey! Devon Aoki is in DEBS. I guess I'll watch that!" But more in the way of, "This movie has Devon Aoki in it. I won't not watch it just because of that."

Accompanying her, Hayabusa is played by none other than Kane Kosugi, son of the legendary (to me, anyway) Sho Kosugi, who starred in many of the best ninja exploitation films of the 1980s and then went on to host Ninja Theater and release a ninja exercise video in which he was accompanied by the scantily clad Ninjettes. One gets the feeling that Sho probably appreciates DOA. Kane started his acting career alongside his dad, always playing the son of whatever ninja guy Sho was playing at the time. Kane never developed much in the way of an American acting career, but he clicked in Japan and managed to forge a pretty consistent string of jobs, including a role in a Japanese sentai television series (those superhero shows that get turned into the Power Rangers in the United states), a role in one of those crappy new Ultraman shows, and most recently one of the leads in Godzilla: Final Wars (even though the lead role should have gone to Godzilla). He isn't really that great of an actor, but he's no worse than his dad (although his dad also wasn't a native English speaker), and he does handle action scenes well, which is generally all he's expected to do. As he gets older, he is looking a lot like his father, so much so that I'm beginning to wonder if Kane isn't Sho Kosugi, his revitalized youth the result of some esoteric ninja ritual or something. Oh sure, you say, but what about all those times Sho and Kane appeared alongside one another? Well, yeah. Maybe -- or maybe they just told us that was Kane Kosugi. Honestly, they could have hired any kid.

Anyway, Hayabusa is along for the ride, trying to convince Katsumi that she should return home while also helping her out with her investigation. Ayane is a little more hostile. Despite her love for Katsumi's missing brother, Ayane holds clan law more important, and clan law dictates that when Katsumi abandoned her post as leader, she was marked for death. Ayane is played by Natassia Malthe, who has a string of cult film credits to her name but is probably most recognizable, to people who might recognize such an actress, for her role as Typhoid in Elektra or for her upcoming title role in the sequel to video game based movie Bloodrayne. I may be one of the few people in the world who would think, "Elektra and Bloodrayne II? Sounds good to me!"

Second on the list of DOA combatants is Tina Armstrong, played by Jamie Pressly of My Name is Earl fame. Pressly is pretty much the only person who showed up to this film with the intention of acting, and she steals the movie as a pro wrestler looking for the opportunity to prove she's a genuine fighter. The film introduces us to her as she reclines aboard her yacht while wearing an American flag motif bikini, stirred out of her sunbathing just long enough to beat the snot out of a bunch of pirates (lead by none other than Robin Shou, former star of such movies as Mortal Kombat, and, umm, well, just that and Mortal Kombat II, really). When our founding fathers first set forth the basic premise of this great land of ours, I'm sure that they could conjure up no greater symbol of American awesomeness than a hot chick in an American flag motif bikini beating up pirates. OK, maybe Thomas Jefferson would disagree. But whatever. Fuckin' Jefferson. Ask Ben Franklin. He'd be on board.

Tina's pro-wrestling dad is also in the tournament, play by real-life pro wrestler (there's something...ironic? about the phrase "real-life pro wrestler") Kevin "Big Daddy Cool Diesel" Nash, who is dressed up more or less like Hulk Hogan in a somewhat lame gag I'm sure Nash found amusing. Since Kevin Nash's job in this movie is to drink beer and go, "That's my little girl!" he turns in the second best acting job after Pressly.

Finally there's Holly Valance as Christie Allen, a posh thief who shows up to the tournament while on the run from the Hong Kong police. Or someone like that. Valance is definitely no actress. I think she was some sort of mid-level Aussie pop star before this movie, and it's unlikely much will change after this movie. She's hot, though, and just bad enough an actress to still be somewhat acceptable in a movie of this nature. And she does the thing where she throws a gun and a bra up into the air, then sticks her arm up so that her bra goes magically on just as she catches the gun and whups the butt of the world's most incompetent bunch of cops. I mean, really, when a kungfu chick, however hot she may be, asks you to hand her a bra, do you really offer it to her as it dangles from the barrel of your gun? And I don't mean that figurative gun. I mean the actual gun, the one she can now kick out of your hands.

Along with a bunch of other fighters you will never care about (and most of whom just disappear at random throughout the movie with no explanation presented anywhere other than deleted scenes), the three ladies head to the island fortress lorded over by brilliant mastermind and DOA tournament manager Eric Roberts. Yes, folks, Eric Roberts, looking like a dude who would hang around the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame a lot, telling young kids about what a genius Jimmy Page was. In a feat of casting not rivaled since the days when Black Belt Jones cast Scatman Crothers as a karate master, crummy movie mainstay Eric Roberts is the lord of DOA, and with the help of his nerdy assistant Weatherby, Roberts aims to use the DOA tournament as a way to inject the world's best fighters with nanotech robots that will harvest their genetic information and make it downloadable to a pair of sunglasses which will then instill the wearer with nigh invincible kungfu prowess.

Seriously, man, that's the plot. All Eric Roberts needs to do for his nefarious scheme to work is, 1) capture each of the best fighters in the DOA tournament, 2) strap them into his gigantic info downloading machine, and 3) manage to keep a clunky pair of sunglasses on his face while fighting. And the end result is that you will be a slightly better fighter than most other people. On the grand scale of nefarious schemes, this one ranks pretty close to the "moronic" end of the bell curve. I mean, how is being a marginally better kungfu guy than most other kungfu guys going prove profitable to anyone other than, say, a guy in the Ultimate Fighting Championship? And then, you have to get the ref to allow you to wear sunglasses while you're fighting. And it's not like Eric Roberts put a sports band or anything on those glasses, so they will eventually just fall off. But it doesn't matter, because were centuries away from the era when being good at kungfu guaranteed global supremacy.

Complicating Roberts' already goofy plan is the fact that the original DOA founder's daughter, Helena, is an aspiring DOA combatant herself and is beginning to suspect Roberts is up to something her father wouldn't have approved of. Oh, and there's Katsumi's missing brother. In between that nonsense and all the awful dialog are a whole bunch of choppy fights of varying quality, a game of volleyball, and well, that's pretty much it. DOA has absolutely no surprises to offer even the most easily surprised viewer. But does that mean this movie is as awful as it sounds? Of course. And does that mean that it's as great as it is awful? You betcha.

The script, such as it is, comes to us courtesy of a trio of writers who actually have, if not a respectable track record writing good action films, then at least a modest record writing halfways decent action films. J.F. Lawton scripted two of the better Steven Seagal films (as odd as that statement may seem to some), Under Seige and Under Seige II, as well as the cult film spoof Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. His big gig, however (besides writing Pretty Woman, but what does that have to do with us?), was as a regular writer for the goofy television series VIP, in which a group of hot chicks run a private investigation service. And when you realize that was one of Lawton's former jobs, the entire look and feel of DOA makes perfect, predictable sense. with a few tweaks here and there, this really could pass as a VIP movie, right down to the three-letter title. Lawton worked on more serious action films like The Hunted starring Joan Chen and Christopher Lambert fighting ninjas, and he worked on goofier action movies, like the Damon Wayans superhero spoof misfire Blankman. So you can pretty much see where the script for DOA came from.

Script contributors Seth and Adam Gross were writers for Bill Nye, the Science Guy. I guess they came up with Eric Roberts' crazy science scheme, although i think the sheer goofiness of it all makes it more of a Beakman thing, really.

Cory Yuen's direction is a little uninspired compared to other efforts, though he puts his craft to good use in filming the ladies (Yuen has previous experience with cheesecake kungfu thanks to his turn in the director's seat of Women on the Run, which features some rather interesting, um, kung-nude). DOA lacks the slick polish of So Close, though Yuen is still adept at making cheap films look flashy. But even though the cinematography may be lacking, he misses no opportunity to randomly cut to a shot of someone's ass or cleavage, so he's not totally off his game here. And while Yuen is used to making non martial artists look like martial artists, he really has his work cut out for him in this movie. Aoki and Valance seem to possess almost no athletic ability whatsoever, and so to pass them off as fighters, Yuen relies on gravity-defying wirework and jumpy editing, as well as a dollop of CGI. He does the most he can with what little he has, but no one is going to be mistaking these gals for legitimate fighters. Even Hsu Chi was more believable. Jamie Pressly fares better largely because she has a pretty awesomely athletic build and looks like she really could deliver some punches and kicks and make you feel them. There's a reason why she's the one out of all these women who went on to have the biggest career. She's adept at both the job of acting and the job of looking good in the fight scenes. Sho Kosugi, errr, Kane Kosugi gets to have one fight scene all to himself, which ends up being the only fight scene that looks anything like vintage Cory Yuen, since this is a guy who knows martial arts fighting a bunch of stuntmen. But even though this fight is pretty good, the award for best fight scene has to go to the one between Valance and Sarah Carter, who plays Helena. And that's because that fight is between two sexy chicks in bikinis. On the beach. In the rain. In slow motion.

Yuen manages to wring a few other choice action sequences from a game but largely incapable cast. His skill alone is what elevates this film above the level of, say, an Andy Sidaris action film. Aoki and purple-wig wearing Malthe have a decent wirefu match-up in a bamboo forest, which many people have pegged as a cheap knock-off of the bamboo forest fight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, even though it has more in common with the same type of scene as presented in Andrew Lau's Stormriders. The finale against a super-powered Eric Roberts (who's acting suggests that if you asked him today, he might not even be aware of the fact that he ever even appeared in this film) isn't exactly solid fight choreography, but it's still funny and exciting because, well hell, it's Eric Roberts. What the hell is even going on? And by this point, Yuen has resorted to his trademark jettisoning of any and all semblances of logic or reality, and believe me when I say that semblances of logic and reality are the last thing a movie like this needs.

Leave it to Liu Chia-liang to make such a sweeping film and draw such meaning from a fighting form. Few directors would be able to do that, despite the fact that kungfu is obviously a fighting philosophy. Sure, you can throw out some quotes, the old "Be like water" saying and all that, but really plumbing the depths of all that is good and bad about the philosophy of kungfu is something few directors have attempted, and as far as I know, only Liu Chia-liang has succeeded at.

The movie begins with a cult of pugilists, men who believe that by practicing a sacred form of kungfu, their bodies will become impervious to the guns of the foreign countries threatening China. The historical link to this is the Boxer Rebellion in China, in which martial artists believed exactly what the characters in this film believe. The results were, predictably enough, tragic, though not as tragic s the results of benevolent Mao Tse-tung's "Great Leap Forward" and "Cultural Revolution." China just never has an easy time, does it?

One of the elders of the society denounces the ridiculous and deadly belief in pugilism. Rather than order his students to their deaths under the pretense that they have become invincible, he openly criticizes and leaves the society. This draws their ire, and they spend their days setting him up as a traitor who wants to see China controlled by foreign powers. The elder, who is played by the film's director, Liu Chia-liang, goes into hiding.

But a kungfu man can only hide for so long, especially when so many people are looking for him. A Shaolin monk played by Liu Chia-hui wants to fight him because he believes Chia-liang to be a traitor. Hsiao Ho plays a young up-and-coming fighter looking to make a name for himself with the Boxers. And Liu chia-yung plays another elder member of the society who wants to kill Chia-liang in order to cover up his own shame.

Chia-liang's only friend is Kara Hui Ying-hung, but she's a pretty good friend to have. In case y'all haven't picked up, along with Angela Mao, Lina Romay, and Jeanine Garafolo, Hui Ying-hung completes the quartet of World's Greatest Female Stars. But Hui Ying-hung will always be my favorite out of them all, because, well, she's just that cool.

She hangs out with Chia-liang, who is living a humble life as a wood cutter. At least for a little while. Eventually, he must face off with each of the men searching for him. The result is a series of incredible kungfu fights that culminate in the superb showdown with his brother, both in the film and in real life, Liu Chia-yung. These two face off using the legendary 18 weapons of kungfu, thus the title.

Liu Chia-liang fights are the best Shaw Brothers films have to offer, but for all their intricacies, they are rarely "to the death." More often, his characters fight "to the understanding," and the violence ends when one character has understood something important. Such is the case with the spectacular fights in Legendary Weapons of China. It's just one more example of Liu putting the philosophy of Buddhism and kungfu before the sensationalistic violence.

The pugilist theme is not an uncommon one in martial arts films, though it's also not as common as some people might think, probably because making any honest comment about it is criticizing the Chinese culture of the past. Once Upon a Time in China II dealt with a similar society but was hardly successful at conveying any real meaning. Legendary Weapons of China on the other hand, is very powerful in the message it conveys. Liu holds up to the light the Chinese stubbornness and unwillingness to acknowledge modern times, their unwillingness to let go of notions of the past in order to move forward. Similar themes ran through other Liu Chia-liang films, such as My Young Auntie and Lady is the Boss.

Liu also takes a quick jab at martial arts fakery via the cameo appearance by Alexander Fu Sheng. Alexander, who was recovering from a devastating accident that left him with two broken legs, plays a charlatan who fakes all his martial arts abilities in order to impress those around him and garner prestige. His scene is the only real comic relief this otherwise serious film possesses.

The film's only weakness is in the characterization. So much time is spent on philosophy and fighting that the characterization suffers a little. While I understood the commentary and the situations, it was difficult to really empathize with any of the characters, as they were all a bit on the bland side. It may simply be because previous experiences with Liu Chia-liang films showed just how well he could create a character, and in here, that human touch is lost amid the messages.

Not that the characterization is non-existent. These people still have a lot more depth to them than the characters in most kungfu films. Liu's curse is that the standards are always so high for his films; even a small glitch seems more obvious in his work since it's usually so perfectly executed.

Legendary Weapons of China is a classic, not just of the genre, but of film in general. It peels away layer after layer, examining Chinese attitudes, martial philosophy, and the martial arts movie genre itself. Liu always has a lot going on in his films, but this one exceeds them all. I don't think it's his most entertaining film. It's not his most action-packed film. But it's certainly one that will provoke thought, and on a more superficial level, it's still grade-A kungfu action.

With a film like Young Taoism Fighter or Fantasy Mission Force, or the film up for discussion here, Bastard Swordsman, divining a comprehensible reason behind the lunacy is far more challenging. It's not that these films suffer from some insurmountable cultural barrier; though they may be based upon or reference classic and contemporary Chinese stories and comic books, such things, especially in the age of the Internet and a globally connected tangled web of shared pop culture, are hardly inaccessible to fans in the West. Many classic works have been translated, and many more have, at the very least, been well summarized and explained in English. The same goes for modern works of fantastic fiction, specifically the Hong Kong comic books and martial arts novels from which so many films draw their inspiration. They are not common knowledge, perhaps, but neither are they arcane secrets locked away in some box that can only be opened by someone who tests positive for Chinese citizenship, a national identity that is verified using such questions as, "Do you like to spit?" and "How do you feel about cleaning your ears in public?" Incidentally, although my relatives are American Southerners of Scottish decent, a good many of them manage to test positive for Chinese citizenship.

Neither, do I think, is this a symptom of filmmakers who are so deep and complex that it becomes a lifetime chore just to unravel their meaning. There is little of James Joyce in Jimmy Wang Yu. Although I have been wrong about some things in the past, I am firmly placed in my opinion that Jimmy Wang Yu did not have any deep-rooted meaning or message embedded in the random ghost houses, flying Amazons, and kidnapping of Abraham Lincoln by Chinese Nazis in Buicks that comprises much of the running time of Fantasy Mission Force. Nor do I think that the people who make these films are throwing weird stuff up on screen just for the sake of being weird, because in general, people who do that never come up with anything quite this weird. There is a twisted, feverish imagination at work in many of these films, and the situations and characters that are borne of these imaginations are possessed of a weirdness quite unlike any other type of cinematic weirdness. Maybe it comes from having multiple people dashing off different parts of the script mere minutes before each scene is scheduled to be filmed. Maybe it comes from taking one too many punches to the head. Maybe there is liberal consumption of Bruce Lee's old hashish brownies during scriptwriting sessions. Whatever the reasons, anyone who submerges themselves in the weird world of kungfu cannot emerge as the same person. Like facing the abyss, you come away both scarred and enlightened. Like witnessing one of H.P. Lovecraft's hideous otherworldly monstrosities, sometimes to merely gaze upon them is enough to drive you completely and utterly insane.

Throughout the 1970s, and the first couple years of the 1980s, the Shaw Brothers studio in Hong Kong was cranking three distinct types of martial arts films: there were the films of Chang Cheh and those who followed his style, all about brute force, heroic bloodshed, and male bonding between archetypal characters. There were the films of Liu Chia-liang, featuring more intricate, technically accomplished fight sequences, complex characters, and comedic touches. And though these two directors were the sole definitions of Shaw Bros. martial arts films in the West until very recently, current DVD releases of the Shaws' voluminous libraries finally turned hungry fans on to the third type of Shaw Bros. martial arts film: the artfully designed, lyrical, almost supernatural swordsman fantasies of Chu Yuan.

You could argue, pretty accurately, that Chang Cheh and Liu Chia-liang made kungfu films, while Chu Yuan made martial arts films. The films of the two formers were based on real weapons, real styles, and real historical periods (albeit historical periods that might not be realized with complete authenticity). Chu Yuan, however, based his martial arts films almost exclusively within the realm of fantasy, confined them to the mythical "Martial World," a fairytale version of ancient China populated by secret sects, supernatural styles, and fighters with mystic skills and fighting ability that bore very little resemblance to any form of actual fighting -- though I have a friend whose mother swears that there are some monks who really can fly and shoot bolts of concentrated chi energy from their palms. Chu Yuan shot almost entirely on sets, using highly stylized and extremely detailed art design to conjure up a world that was recognizable yet distinctly fantastic. You knew that the normal rules did not apply.

As the years wore on, Chu Yuan began to incorporate more and more special effects into his films. Relatively straight-forward films like The Bastard gave way to his successful run of swordsman films, many of which featured Shaw superstar Ti Lung navigating his way through a world populated by esoteric clans and secret societies hiding out in underground lairs stuffed to the gills with hidden chambers, trap doors, and wild Mario Bava-esque lighting. And the fighters in his film were increasingly likely to possess otherworldly martial arts skills that enabled them to fly and vanish into thin air. By the end of the 1970s, spilling into the 1980s, Chu Yuan went hog wild and indulged every artistic excess. His later films are crammed with even more characters, even more elaborate lairs, more stylized sets, and now the martial artists could do more than just fly; they could shoot multi-colored rays, spin webs, grow or shrink, and perform all sorts of other insane feats of a superhuman nature. They were Hong Kong's answer to American superheroes and Mexican luchadores.

Several directors followed in the footsteps of Chu Yuan, especially toward the end of the Shaw Bros. run at the top, when a faltering studio and the general sense that the Shaw product was outdated and stuffy when compared to what they were doing over at Golden Harvest (home of Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, and Yuen Biao, among others) meant that desperate producers and directors were throwing every zany thing they could think of onto the screen in a last-ditch attempt to salvage some portion of the public interest. The slapdash desperation, dwindling budgets, and speedy shooting schedules, coupled with the fact that many filmmakers were trying to cram sprawling epic novels and comic book series into hundred minute movies meant that much of what was produced at the end of the studio's lifespan was as wildly imaginative and insane as it was completely incomprehensible and convoluted.

Somewhere amid the maelstrom of this "anything goes" free for all, we find director Lu Chin-Ku's delirious martial arts fantasy Bastard Swordsman, two films that are really just one long film split into two parts for easier consumption. Lu began his directing career in the 1970s with a series of generally nondescript, low-budget kungfu films. As an actor, he appeared in a whole passel of Shaw Bros. productions, including some of their more infamous titles, such as Bruce Lee and I, the softcore Bruce Lee biopic starring Danny Lee (John Woo's The Killer) and Bruce's real-life possible mistress, Betty Ting Pei. In the 1980s, however, probably as a result of studying Chu Yuan's films as well as attempting to mimic the special-effects laden films of Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung that helped usher in the Hong Kong New Wave, Lu decided to dabble in films of a similar nature. In 1983, he directed a duo of such over-the-top fantasy films for the Shaw Bros.: Holy Flame of the Martial World and Bastard Swordsman.

Bastard Swordsman started out as a 1978 television series under the title Reincarnated, starring Norman Chu and female lead Nora Miao, who appeared alongside Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon and Fist of Fury, as well as appearing in Chu Yuan's classic Clans of Intrigue. Norman Chu had been steadily working his way up through the ranks of Shaw Bros. martial arts stars, appearing in just about all of Chu Yuan's martial arts fantasies during the 1970s (including Killer Clans, Magic Blade, Legend of the Bat, Web of Death, Clans of Intrigue and, well, more than there's a point to list right now) as well as films directed by Chang Cheh and Liu Chia-liang. The action in the Reincarnated television series was directed by Ching Siu-tung, who would himself go on to pair with producer (and sometimes overbearing co-director) Tsui Hark to usher in the Hong Kong New Wave with films like Zu and Duel to the Death -- both of which happen to feature Norman Chu. Chu also appeared in Patrick Tam's The Sword alongside Adam Cheng (who would himself go on to play one of the other major roles in Zu), regarded by many as the first film of the Hong Kong New Wave -- a dubious claim at best, dependent entirely on how you define the Hong Kong New Wave.

The unique thing about Reincarnated -- the Chinese title for which translates literally to "Transformation of the Heavenly Silkworm" -- was that, unlike the Chu Yuan films that inspired it, it was not based on a previously existing novel. In fact, the success of the original television show inspired subsequent novels, as well as a sequel series and, finally, the Shaw Bros. produced two-part Bastard Swordsman movie, the Chinese title for which is the same as that of the Reincarnated television series.

For the films, and because he was already an established hand at the studio, they were able to once again cast Norman Chu (he did not appear in the sequel television series, and I doubt very seriously that, given the incompatibilities between paperback books and human anatomy, he ever appeared in any of the novelizations, though if he did, that would have been quite a surprise for whoever opened the book and found him stuffed in there) as orphan Yen-fei, the constantly bullied servant at the Wudong school, one of the most revered pillars of the Martial World. Despite the rep, it seems very few of the students at the school are all that great, and while they should be practicing their martial arts, they instead taunt Yen-fei like a bunch of elementary school bullies, surrounding him and calling him names while they all point at him, and throwing daggers at him -- just like in elementary school, like I said. It's hard to believe any of these students are grown men. I mean, seriously. Surrounding him and chanting names while they all point at him? Shouldn't these guys have outgrown that by the time they turned ten years old? Hell, though it's not featured in the film, it seems like they probably also made him eat bugs.

Yen-fei can find no relief from his childish tormentors. The school elders constantly judge in favor of the students, and the school master (Wong Yung), has a curiously zealous grudge against the harried orphan. Only the master's daughter (Lau Suet-wah, who has awesomely sexy eyebrows) treats Yen-fei with any sort of kindness, but being the abused black sheep of the school, he's forever too shy to pledge his love to her.

Yen-fei's not the only one with problems, though. The master and his brother (the superior martial artist and sort of the shadow master of the school) must soon show up for their regularly scheduled duel with the ruthless master of the rival Invincible Clan, who can't let a day go by without having his henchmen cart him over in a palanquin so he can laugh in everyone's face and toss some of the useless Wudong students around. I really wish the villains of the world were more like the villains in martial arts movies. Instead of just threatening us via Internet video, imagine what it would be like if the leaders of al-Quaeda instead arrived at the steps of the Capitol building to belt out evil laughter and point a lot, thus requiring members of Congress to file down the stairs in formation while wielding staves. The world went wrong the day our despots and villains stopped sitting in thrones surrounded by henchmen. Now Stalin -- I bet that guy would have shown up and cut loose with the evil laughter if he'd had the chance. It would have worked, too, because no American President ever looked more like a Shaolin monk than Eisenhower.

Although this Invincible Clan guy is kind of a prick, he also has good reason to laugh. The Wudong master knows there is no way he can possibly beat the guy. In fact, in all their assorted duels, they've never beat him, probably because his secret kungfu style is the Fatal Skill, which is a pretty direct and to the point skill that gets the job done and allows you to glow green. By contrast, the Wudong secret skill is the Silkworm Technique. Now how is the Silkworm Technique going to stand a chance against The Invincible Clan's Fatal Skills? Especially when no one in the Wudong school has actually ever mastered the Silkworm technique! To make matters worse, the Invincible Clan has decided that this year, if Wudong loses the duel, the Invincible Clan is just going to kill them all because, frankly, who the hell needs Wudong around anyway?

Meanwhile, we learn that Yen-fei has secretly been training in kungfu under the guidance of a mysterious masked man who has turned the youth into the greatest fighter Wudong has ever produced. However, in exchange for his training, Yen-fei has to swear that he will never let any of his fellow Wudong students know he knows kungfu. This becomes increasingly difficult to comply with as the Invincible Clan comes down on Wudong and a wandering swordsman (Anthony Lau) appears who also seems to have it in for Yen-fei and his school. In the end, Yen-fei is forced to flee while the Invincible Clan, his own Wudong students, and the members of a couple other martial arts clans from around the Martial World all seek to kill him and each other before Yen-fei can perfect his skills, unlock the secret of the Silkworm Technique, and sort out the piles and piles of intrigue and deep, dark secrets.

Compared to the wuxia mysteries of Chu Yuan, the first Bastard Swordsman movie is pretty straight-forward. There are a lot of characters, but it's pretty easy to keep everyone straight, as they all have distinct traits and personalities and, for the most part, play fairly major roles in the plot of the story -- as opposed to Chu Yuan films, where there are likely to be twice as many characters, many of whom appear and disappear with little or no explanation, and many of whom are so aloof and remote that it becomes a chore to tell them apart. The plot of Bastard Swordsman is the basic "innocent man must prove his innocence" plot made more complicated by the fact that no one can ever finish a simple sentence before someone else yells, "Shut up! I don't want to hear your lies!" and flies at them through the air while shooting brightly colored beams. If there is one fault to be found with the film, this is it, and while I understand that it helps propel us directly into the fight scenes, there are times when I wish someone would just take the ten seconds to say the one sentence or one word that would avert all this bickering. But I guess that's sort of the point, that people in the microcosm of the Martial World are too wrapped up in squabbles and power plays to do the one simple thing or say the one simple sentence that would eliminate so much tragedy.

None of what I've written so far in attempting summarize the basic plot sounds all that weird, and I guess few things do when they are boiled down to their essential components. The weirdness comes in the embellishments, and make no mistake about it, Bastard Swordsman is embellished with so much weirdness that it'll damn near blow your mind. We're not talking the sheer level of pandemonium attained by Buddha's Palm (another late-era Shaw Bros. martial arts fantasy), but make no mistake about it, this films is plenty crazy and derives its craziness not from astoundingly confounding plots (by wuxia standards, these films are very straight-forward), but from the supernatural nature of the martial arts and the special effects employed in realizing these powers on screen.

The same year Bastard Swordsman was released also saw the release of Ching Siu-tung's Duel to the Death, another film stuffed with magic ninjas, wizards, and flying swordsman, directed by the man who had worked on the original Reincarnated series and starring Norman Chu. Duel to the Death broke new ground and served as a massive leap forward in the quality of special effects presented in Hong Kong movies, thanks largely to the information brought back from America by producer-director Tsui Hark, who applied his newfound knowledge (he spent considerable time in the States studying Industrial Light and Magic special effects techniques) in excess in his own Norman Chu-starring film, Zu.

Bastard Swordsman, on the other hand, relied almost entirely on somewhat outdated, low budget tricks. Where as Duel to the Death was produced at Golden Harvest, then overflowing with cash from the success of upstart stars and directors like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung and only just emerging as the dominant force in Hong Kong filmmaking, the ambition of Bastard Swordsman is foiled by the limited resources available at the Shaw Studio, which was waning just as fast as Golden Harvest was rising. All the hot actors, directors, and choreographers were at Golden Harvest (and later, at Tsui Hark's offshoot Film Workshop). Shaw Bros. movies still had their audiences, but they were increasingly out of date and unpopular, and the few young stars the studio had were no longer under exclusive contract the way they had been in previous decades. Like England's Hammer Studios a decade before, the Shaw Bros. had gone from leader of the pack to creaky artifact. By the time Bastard Swordsman went into production, the once-illustrious studio was all but a thing of the past.

As such, none of the technical innovation that went into Duel to the Death or Zu found its way into Bastard Swordsman, which instead had to rely on the archaic methods that had served them in the 70s -- wirework and crude animation. Of course, now the sands of time have swept multiple eras up into one uber-era, and Zu and Duel to the Death are scarcely recognizable to newer fans as being any more or less crudely realized than Bastard Swordsman and Return of the Bastard Swordsman, and as things get mixed into a big ol' stew of "old stuff," it becomes a lot easier to look back on the special effects in Bastard Swordsman as over-the-top, colorful, and fun than it must have been to look at them in 1983 and see anything but cheap crap pumped out by a dying studio.

Naturally, everyone glows and has colored lights shining on them. Most everyone can fly, and a more accomplished martial artists can shoot colorful glowing beams out of their hands. Norman Chu's Yen-fei is drenched in animated blue energy when he summons his power, looking a bit like that Lightning guy from Big Trouble in Little China. Once he becomes a master of Silkworm technique, he can spin webs, toss his enemies about, and imprison them in a cocoon he can then kick and bash around until his foe is little more than a pile of rattled bones. But that's nothing compared to Chen Kuan-tai's secret ninja skill in Return of the Bastard Swordsman, which allows him to inflate his chest and use his heartbeat (while he glows, naturally) to take over the pulse of his opponent, which in turn allows him to make them cough up their own heart. But we'll get to that later.

That's all just the tip of the iceberg, as both Bastard Swordsman films are crammed with esoteric rites, rituals, and fighting techniques all wielded by a cast of increasingly outlandish characters. While Chu Yuan films were prone to stop from time to time for bouts of exposition and philosophizing, Lu's Bastard Swordsman rarely take a break from the ridiculous, over-the-top action. Very few and far between are the scenes free of guys shooting lasers at each other, or flying around engaging in sword duels. But while other such wuxia fantasies rely almost entirely on wild special effects-driven fighting, the Bastard Swordsman duo strike a healthy mix between supernatural martial arts shenanigans and genuine fight choreography. With action direction by Yuen Tak (one of those Yuens, the ones who adopted the name of their Peking Opera master, a group that also includes Yuen Wah, Cory Yuen Kwai, and Yuen Biao -- not to mention the guys who didn't change their names, like Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan -- but not the clan of Yuens that included Yuen Wo-ping. what is it with that surname, anyway?), both Bastard Swordsman films boast excellent hand-to-hand and sword fights that don't rely on wires or glowing animation of crackling blue energies.

Although people come for the weirdness and spectacle, Bastard Swordsman offers plenty of other elements that make it worth staying around. For starters, taking a note from Chu Yuan, Lu's film is packed with complex, well-developed characters. Chang Cheh always dealt in symbols and archetypes, while Chu Yuen favored more human (though still supernaturally powerful) characters. The cast of Bastard Swordsman falls somewhere in the middle, and much of the film's power comes from the quality job done by the actors inhabiting the characters. Norman Chu makes a compelling and empathetic lead. We root for him when he's the abused underdog, and we cheer for him once he begins to discover his true potential as a fighter.

But the real complexity is manifest in the leader of the Invincible Clan. He's sort of evil, sort of not. He definitely has a grudge against the Wudong, but we never really have a clear picture of whether or not Wudong is all that heroic by contrast. We never see them out defending the poor or performing kind acts, and frankly, what we see of most of the members sort of makes them out to be dicks. Who knows if they are really any more or less "evil" than the Invincible Clan? Invincible Leader is mostly considered evil because he does that laugh. But when he defeats the master of Wudong, he grants leniency in carrying out the death sentence, going so far as to issue a command that no one in the realm should lay a finger on any member of the Wudong Clan until he himself has time to kill them. When yet another rival clan attacks the Wudong and claims to be from the Invincible Clan, it's the Wudong who refuse to listen to explanation or investigate the situation, while the Invincible Clan vows to get to the bottom of who wronged the Wudong and violated the proclamation.

There's also the estranged wife (Yuen Qiu) and daughter (Candy Wen Xue-er) of the Invincible Clan leader, both of whom have secret connections to Wudong and Yen-fei, and both of whom are far deeper characters than "evil dragon lady" or "damsel in distress." Along with the daughter of the Wudong leader, they each play vital roles in helping Yen-fei unlock his skills and, with any luck, put an end to all the squabbling in the Martial World. That they play such significant, developed, and heroic roles in the film is definitely something Lu picked up from his Shaw Bros. peers Chu Yuan and Liu Chia-liang, both of whom were well known for featuring women in substantial roles while Chang Cheh couldn't wait to get the dames off the screen and get back to a shirtless Ti Lung being stabbed in the gut.

The rest of the Invincible Clan seems pretty noble as well, especially compared to the cowardly, squabbling, whining Wudong students and elders. Yen-fei definitely has more in common with the Invincible leader than he does with his own clan. Both men are striving to attain a level of martial arts prowess that will elevate them beyond the human sphere and grant them near godlike powers. If the Invincible Leader is a dick, if he tends to laugh a lot, if he sits with rakish casualness in his sparkly throne, it's probably because he is so dedicated to the attainment of the ultimate level of martial arts that he almost ceases to be human or relate to human morality. Yen-fei is similar, but his upbringing and his relationship with the three women keep him from becoming disconnected from his humanity.

Lu's direction is gorgeous, aided greatly by the cinematography which takes full advantage of the widescreen format. Along with the bright glowing beams of light, Lu splashes each scene with vibrant colors. The art design definitely owes a debt to Chu Yuan, but where as he likes to keep his films almost entirely set-bound, Lu Chin-ku mixes stylish sets with outdoor locations, reflecting perhaps his penchant for alternating between supernatural special-effects fights and more authentic sword fights and kungfu. Although Bastard Swordsman ultimately falls short of the elegance of Chu Yuan at his best, it's still a breathtakingly beautiful and meticulously constructed adventure.

Part one of the film resolves some of the major plot points it introduces -- specifically the sorting out of the Wudong intrigue and the appearance of the mysterious swordsman. However, it leaves plenty of other plot threads -- specifically the conflict between Yen-fei and Invincible Clan's leader -- dangling to be wrapped up in the sequel, which, conveniently, picks up right where the first film leaves off.

Bruce Li doesn't look like Bruce Lee. He doesn't have the muscles Bruce had, and sure as hell doesn't have the talent. They could have cast former Monkee Mickey Dolenz as Bruce and had a more believable imitator on their hands.

The basic plot of this film revolves around Bruce's desire to leave Hollywood and his white woman behind, return to Hong Kong, get a nice Chinese girl, and settle down to a traditional Chinese life. Somehow, I don't think so. Betty Ting Pei is portrayed as a sweet and loving woman whom only wanted what was best for Bruce. And all this time we thought she was a sluttish gangster-groupie drug addict who only had a career because of her harpyish addiction to famous men. Oh well, to her credit, in many of the films she would later make, she got naked.

This film is filled with nail-biting boredom, horrible fights scenes, and factual inaccuracies so utterly absurd that the whole thing crosses over from purely tasteless, boring drivel and becomes an insult.

This film relishes everything that was sordid and seedy about Lee's life, making it the mirror opposite of the similarly named Hollywood version of Bruce's life. Someday, someone will tell his story accurately, and you'll have a moving, powerful portrait of a flawed but ultimately heroic human being.

Until then, we have utter garbage like this three-day old trash. Bruce Li is at his worst here. We know he can be a decent actor and martial artist when he tried, but this movie is just plain awful. If this was how Bruce Li paid tribute to "his master," then Lee's ghost must be out gunning for revenge.

That in itself would be an interesting movie. Bruce Lee's ghost comes back to beat the shit out of Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Brute Lee, and all the other lame-ass wannabes who cashed in on his name, life, and death. And maybe, if we're lucky, he'll beat the shit out of David Carradine as well ... just for good measure, of course.

So it was only fitting that Hong Kong's greatest sword hero be among the first stars to make the transition to kungfu hero. Jimmy's first foray into unarmed martial arts was Chinese Boxer, a decent enough film, especially by early standards, but it was clear that Jimmy would not rule the kungfu world the way he had rules the sword hero world.

But that doesn't mean he didn't turn in some great films. Of all his unarmed fighting films, it is in One-Armed Boxer II that he is most unarmed, as he only has one of them. Jimmy first got into the armless guy swing of things in One-Armed Swordsman and a sequel. Then he lost his arm for One-Armed Boxer and this film, and then lost his hand in Iron Man. This one, which is also known as Master of the Flying Guillotine is the second best of all the armless guy martial arts films--of which there are shockingly many. The best is still One-Armed Swordsman.

This is also a weird one. Not exactly a sequel to the first one but working in the same territory, the film opens with a creepy Throbbing Gristle like soundtrack. A blind kungfu master learns that a one-armed Ming revolutionary has killed the two pupils he sent to apprehend the rebel. so he does what any good blind kungfu master would do; he flies through the roof and vows revenge.

The blind man fights using the dreaded flying guillotine, a decapitating weapon that even has it's own movie. It's a metal box with retractable blades connected to a long chain. All you have to do is throw it on your enemy's head, and pop! Off comes the noggin!

Meanwhile, our one-armed hero, played by Jimmy Wang Yu, is busy showing off for his students by walking up walls and doing other stuff that kungfu masters do. They decide to attend a kungfu tournament where the combatants do all sorts of crazy stuff.

A fighter from India has arms that extend out like 20 feet--a trick that would later be used in the Street Fighter video game. There's also a Thai Boxer, some regular kungfu guys, a kungfu woman, and a mysterious Japanese guy in a big hat. The blind master shows up and recruits many of the fighters in his quest to kill every one-armed man in the area until he gets the right one. Luckily, there seem to be a lot of one-armed guys in this town.

The movie is great. Wang Yu looks good against all the weird martial artists, and there is a supernatural feel to much of the film. It's brutal and bleak, with the spooky soundtrack and some intense fighting. I think it's great. One of the best kungfu films out there, just for the sheer weirdness of it all. And the fightin' ain't bad, either.

Kungfu films also serve as a road map for building rewarding, emotionally rich familial relationships, teaching us the most productive way (snake fist) to deal with conflicts within the family structure. The landscape of kungfu films is littered with films in which a son and a father, or a daughter and father, or two siblings, must struggle both against one another as well as together against a greater outside threat. This often manifests itself as some wholesome bonding activity, such as jumping from pole to pole over a field of knives, or trying to grab the chicken bits out of each other's rice bowls. Visit any modern family or marital therapist, and you find that, nine times out of ten, they employ the same -- or at least very similar -- methods for working through the issues that complicate interpersonal relationships.

House of Fury is a more modern look at the nuclear kungfu family, and while its look and style have been updated for modern sensibilities, the core message at the center of the film remains consistent with the many that came before it: the family that trains in kungfu together will deal out swift kungfu vengeance together.

Anthony Wong stars as Yu Siu-bo, a somewhat boring practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and physical therapy. He delights in spinning outrageous yarns about his past adventures fighting ninjas and assorted supervillains, a practice which embarrasses his two teenage children, college-age slacker Nicky (Stephen Fung, Avenging Fist, Gen-X Cops, Gen-Y Cops) and high schooler Natalie (Gillian Chung, one-half of the Hong Kong pop superduo Twins and star of The Twins Effect), both of whom assume their dad is just a world-class bullshitter. At least, they assume that right up until a wheelchair bound psycho named Rocco (your buddy and mine, Michael Wong) shows up hoping to drag the identity of a retired secret agent out of Siu-bo. Suddenly, the two siblings realize everything their father has ever told them has more or less been true, and now they're caught right in the middle of a frenzied kungfu battle between their father and Rocco's thugs. Luckily, this being a kungfu film, dad trained his kids well.

House of Fury is a family film in more ways than simply being about the evolution of the relationship between two children and their father (involving the "tall tale" characteristic that allows me to actually compare the themes of a film full of crazy flying ninjas and kungfu and Tim Burton's Big Fish). For starters, the number of familiar old faces on parade is more than enough to counterbalance the presence of shining new stars like Gillian Chung and Stephen Fung. Anthony Wong is a welcome addition to any cast, and when he's interested in his role, there are few actors in this world that are finer at their craft. He's top notch as the good-hearted but drab Siu-bo, padding about the place, weaving spectacularly crazy adventure tales, and talking to a photo of his dead wife. He's both comical and poignant without ever being overly saccharine. He plays the comedy and action as well as he does the loneliness of the character. Inhabited by Anthony Wong, Siu-bo simply feels like a real guy. When his secret comes out and he jumps into action, he's just as much fun. His best friend and patient is the aging Uncle Chu, played by Hong Kong movie stalwart Wu Ma. We've seen Wu Ma for decades, and watching him in action) even if it's heavily aided by wires and CGI) is great fun. He and Wong represent the older generations perfectly.

Additionally, one of Rocco's henchmen is played by Japanese actress Yukari Oshima. Fans who were around in the 1990s will remember Oshima as on of the "girls with guns" superstars that dominated the first half of that decade with hard-hitting kungfu and gunplay action. Although most of the movies from that era remain MIA in DVD or have been released only in cheap dubbed, pan-and-scan quickies, fans of the films and the women who made them remain devoted to the genre and the actresses who defined it -- Moon Lee, Cynthia Khan, Yukari Oshima, American Cynthia Rothrock, and of course, Michelle Yeoh. Oshima, who got her start as part of Sonny Chiba's Japan Action Club and appeared in the sentai series Bioman before making the jump to feature films and super-stardom in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, was always my favorite. Like many of the stars of girls with guns action films, Oshima made the move to Filipino-produced imitations of the genre when it died out in the late 1990s, then seemed to drop off the radar entirely along with everyone else except Michelle Yeoh, who managed to parlay her girls with guns street cred and friendship with then-darling of Hollywood Jackie Chan into a role in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies then into a plum role in Ang Lee's wuxia crossover film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the fame and money from which she used to produce and star in two abysmal adventure films, The Touch and Silverhawk in which, if nothing else, her acquaintance with Jackie Chan has rubbed off on her the tendency to cast herself as characters half her actual age.

It would seem that Yeoh pulled a Harrison Ford -- sucking up all the fame that could have been distributed amongst her co-stars, leaving the likes of Moon Lee and Yukari Oshima in her dust, all but forgotten save by a few die-hards still clutching old VHS copies of the Angel Terminators films or Kickboxer's Tears.

Seeing Yukari Oshima pop up again, looking as gorgeous and deadly as ever, was a real treat for me, and honestly, the main reason I even rented House of Fury. I'd heard good things about the movie, but most of those were from Jackie Chan, and since I believe he played the role of executive producer, I didn't consider his opinion entirely unbiased. But any role, even a small one, for my favorite girl with the thunderbolt kick, was enough to snare my attention.

On the other end of the scale are Stephen Fung and Gillian Chung (and to a lesser extend, Gillian's fellow Twins member and Twins Effect co-star Charlene Choi). Fung, like a seeming endless parade of pretty young faces that started way back with Aaron Kwok and continued through Ekin Cheng and on to Fung, has been regarded as the "hot new thing" that is finally going to salvage Hong Kong cinema from the doldrums in which it's drifted for years, revitalizing the industry and returning to it the spark and magic that made the 70s, 80s, and first half of the 90s so memorable and beloved. He hasn't fulfilled that expectation, but then, it's not really fair to expect it of him. Of the host of hot guys who emerged at the turn of the century to become the somewhat unmemorable and interchangeable faces of the next Hong Kong new wave (which has also yet to really materialize), Fung was a fair enough performer, but he was always a little hollow and cardboard and unspectacular. It was hard, especially for fans who weren't screaming teenage girls, to tell one hot new thing from the next, even when they were all collected together in movies like Gen-X Cops. Thus, when a director wanted to make a "real" film, they still went to the last men standing from the 80s and 90s -- Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Andy Lau, Simon Yam, and of course, Anthony Wong (Stephen Chow doesn't make the list, simply because he's always been sort of a whole film industry unto himself). Thus, especially for me, guys like Fung, Edison Chen, and Nick Tse continue to fail to make the same impression as the guys from whom they were supposed to inherit the mantle.

What Stephen Fung is to the men, Gillian Chung is to the women. As one-half of the pop megastar duo Twins, producers hoped she would carry the name recognition to become a movie superstar where so many other hopeful starlets have simply been swallowed whole, unable to become the next Brigette Lin or Maggie Cheung or, quite frankly, even the next Hsu Chi, or even the next Joey Wong Tsu-hsien. Funny, isn't it? Back in the 80s and 90s, Maggie Cheung was most often described as "irritating" or "insipid," known as she was for little more than being the squealing, whining girlfriend in Jackie Chan's Police Story films. And Hsu Chi? She was just some softcore porn nobody. And now? They're two of the biggest, best respected actresses on the international scene. Who would have guessed it, watching Police Story or whichever the hell The Fruit is Swelling film it is that stars Hsu Chi?

While Gillian is no Hsu Chi, and she's certainly no Maggie Cheung, she's still a pretty solid performer with a lot of charisma. Handled properly, and should there ever be more than one good script every other year coming out of Hong Kong, she does indeed show the potential to become something more than a cute face that will disappear in a couple years. Stephen Fung -- I don't know. He's still kind of a bore, and he still doesn't exude much charisma. I have hope for him, but not nearly as much as I do for Gillian Chung.

As for Chung's Twins partner, Charlene Choi, there's really not much that can be said about her in this film. She has a very small role that doesn't really give her much to do beyond tease Stephen Fung's Nicky for a couple scenes.

I would be remiss, however, if I left my review of the cast at the above. That's a lot of good actors doing good work up there. How can I celebrate them without screwing up my courage and looking at the performances of American-born actors Michael Wong and Daniel "Michael Wong for the next generation" Wu. Wu I first encountered in Gen-X Cops, and I was awed by how spectacularly awful he was. Daniel Wu originally went to Hong Kong simply to "get in touch with his roots," get the feel of the place from which his parents came. An extended stay lead to some modeling work, and from there he found his way into film. He seems like a decent guy in interviews, but that doesn't change the fact that he was really unbelievably horrible in Gen-X Cops. However, each subsequent movie in which he's appeared has seen him improve in tiny increments, so that by the time we've gotten to House of Fury, he is merely bad. And if nothing else, Daniel Wu rolled naked on the beach with Maggie Q where as I simply watched him roll naked on the beach with Maggie Q. Wu was never sold as the next Andy Lau, Tony Leung, or Jackie Chan, but if he keeps working at his craft, he could, at the very least, be the next Aaron Kwok or Leon Lai.

The same can't be said for Wu's countryman, Michael Wong, though Wong did have Ellen Chung naked and grinding away on him in one movie, so that caveat about our relative accomplishments still stands. Michael Wong has been plying his acting craft for a couple decades now, and in every film in which I've seen him, he has wowed me with his ability to never get any better no matter how much experience he has. It's amazing just how consistent he's been over the past many years. It's a sustained level of badness of which Keanu Reeves could only dream. It's absolutely astounding. He never gets better, but he never gets worse. Michael Wong is superhuman in his ability to sound like every role is his first role. And despite being surrounded by world-class veterans and promising young upstarts, Michael Wong manages to deliver the exact same bad level of performance he's always delivered, doggedly refusing to let the presence of Anthony Wong cause him to accidentally step up his game.

I have no idea how Michael Wong has sustained his career for this long. He's good looking, but not that good looking. He's fit, but he's not any good at kungfu and only marginally passable at performing other forms of action choreography. In all aspects of his acting career he is merely below average -- so much so that he's not even bad to the point of being funny. Well, no, sometimes he's funny-bad (witness his anguished plea, "You've gone over to the dark side!" in The First Option), but mostly he's just bad. And yet, the man has never gone wanted for roles. Usually they're in B-team movies, but from time to time he manages to sneak into an honest-to-goodness movie like House of Fury. He must totally baffle his brother Russell (New Jack City and Joy Luck Club, plus a bunch of his own movies, as well as some television work). As for me, I embrace Michael Wong. I don't really like calling anyone "the Ed Wood of." but if ever there was an Ed Wood of acting, it has to be Michael Wong, and I love him for it.

Of course, all my love can't make anyone think that Michael Wong is any good in House of Fury. He's awful. He's so bad he makes Daniel Wu look good, though he doesn't make Daniel Wu in Gen-X Cops look good. You might think that Wong is trying to play Rocco as a cool, calculating, emotionless man consumed by vengeance and just failing at the characterization, but anyone who has seen Michael Wong in any movie before will simply say, "No, that's just Michael Wong. He can't act." His soft-spoken monotone is made even worse by the fact that he's surrounded by performers the caliber of Anthony Wong and Wu Ma, and even young Gillian Chung. Heck, even charisma-vacuum Stephen Fung seems positively animated and warm next to Michael Wong's utterly bizarre performance as the wheelchair-bound Rocco. And in case you think that strapping Wong with a wheelchair means he's not going to have a bad action scene, think again. Action choreographer Yuen Wo-ping (he of too many decades and too many credits to list) figured that the best way to get a decent action scene out of Wong was simply to film him in fast speed rolling around in his wheelchair. Sadly, director Stephen Fung (more on that in a moment) resists the natural urge to set the entire scene to "Yakkety Sax."

The final piece of the main cast is this kid named Jake Strickland. I have no idea who this kid is (this is his first and currently only listed film credit), but I assume Yuen Wo-ping discovered him on some youth martial arts circuit and couldn't resist throwing him into the film as Rocco's son. As an actor, he's not much, but then, what do you expect from a fourteen-year-old American making a foreign language film. He's still better than Michael Wong (both he and Wong deliver their lines in English). The kid is really just here to twirl a staff and kick some ass, and in that sense, he's surprisingly good. Hong Kong films have always had better luck with martial arts kids than American films -- just compare any of the Three Ninjas to that little kid with the perfectly spherical head kicking ass alongside Jet Li in New Legend of Shaolin and My Father is a Hero. It seems that being a decent kiddie kungfu performer doesn't really have much to do with race (obviously), but instead has to do with whether your action director is Yuen Wo-ping or John Turteltaub. Jake Strickland looks fantastic in action, and his fight with Anthony Wong is priceless. Wong is torn between the fact that he doesn't want to beat up a fourteen-year-old kid and the fact that this fourteen-year-old kid is kicking his ass and flipping around with a staff and running up walls, and it makes for a great fight scene. I don't know if we'll ever see Jake Strickland again, but he does a fine job here -- and he has a great name for being either an action star or Hank Hill's boss at the propane shop.

The rest of the action is a pretty good mix between old style kungfu, wire-fu, and a little CGI enhancement here and there. Stephen Fung and Gillian Chung are not accomplished martial artists, and from time to time you can tell that, but most of the time, Yuen Wo-ping poses them and flings them about pretty well. Their fight with Yukari Oshima and the rest of Michael Wong's thugs is a stand-out moment, as is the finale (in which, among other things, Stephen Fung also faces off with Jake Strickland). Anthony Wong, of course, is no martial artist either, but the man has been around long enough to have picked up the tricks of the trade, and he looks good in his few action scenes. Even elderly Wu Ma gets in on the fun. For years, I railed against the tendency to cast non-martial artists as kungfu masters, then mask their lack of skill with wire tricks and flashy editing -- a trend that was largely championed by Yuen Wo-ping (with plenty of help from Ching Siu-tung and Tsui Hark). In my old age, I'm getting soft, or simply accepting that the days of Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, and Yuen Biao are over -- even for Sammo, Jackie, and Biao. House of Fury delivers fantasy kungfu but it does it well, and from time to time, it allows itself to be a throwback, if not to the glory days of Sammo Hung choreography, at least to the solid, no-wires choreography that made Yukari Oshima and the girls with guns genre so much fun.

Now comes the funny part. Although I continue to be unimpressed by Stephen Fung as an actor (calling him a hot young thing really isn't fair -- he's only a year or two younger than me), I was surprised to see that as a writer and director, he's surprisingly accomplished. I have no idea hos much of House of Fury was directed by Fung, and how much was the work of his mentors Yuen Wo-ping and Jackie Chan, but the fact is that Stephen, for whatever amount he directed, showcases a steady hand and the ability to let the film's story speak for itself, rather than piling on lots of irritating flashy editing and intrusive directorial tricks. Surrounded by such talent (as well as Willie Chan, another producer on this film and cohort of Jackie Chan), Stephen Fung may not emerge as the next Jackie Chan in front of the camera, but he has an excellent chance to emerge as the next Jackie Chan behind the camera. There are definitely some signs of the old Jackie and Sammo directorial styles, which were also influenced by the directorial work of Lo Wei (who directed Wu Ma, among others like Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee) and Bruce Lee himself. Although House of Fury boasts the wirework and CGI that seems to be part and parcel of modern kungfu films, the direction itself is surprisingly down to earth and reminiscent of the good ol' days.

Fung also co-wrote the script, along with Yiu Fai-lo (previously the screenwriter for the dreadful Jackie Chan flop Gorgeous and the even more dreadful Andrew Lai horror disaster The Park). Given how dreadful Yiu's previous scripts are, I have no problem attributing the bulk of the work on the script for House of Fury to Stephen Fung. As a guy in his early thirties who no doubt grew up a fan of everyone from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan, this is exactly the sort of movie you'd expect him to write. However, we've seen thanks to countless gigabytes of fanfic that being a fan of something doesn't mean you're going to write a good story about it. Fung's script, on the other hand, is well-written, well-paced, and surprisingly.I don't want to say complex, really. Touching? Maybe that's it. Let's just say it's good. The homage to Bruce Lee exists in the title and in some of Anthony Wong's fight choreography, but other than that, it doesn't play much of a role in the story. At this point, though, fans of Hong Kong cinema should be used to gratuitous Bruce Lee gags and imitations. It's almost as if Stephen Fung wanted to make an 80s style Hong Kong action film and knew that he couldn't do that without throwing in some random Bruce Lee allusions.

Bruce Lee nonsense aside, what Fung has done is write a very good modern-day reinvention of all those old "quarrelling kungfu family" movies that were made in the 1970s -- right down to a "sitting at the table" kungfu fight over bits of chicken. Although being a fan doesn't make you a good writer, a good writer who is fan enough to throw in obscure homages like that makes for a real treat. The relationship between the family is also well-written. The whole "discovering the secret past" thing isn't anything new, but Fung executes the story well. The central theme seems to be that the older generation shouldn't be dismissed, that they have plenty to teach us, and sometimes their rambling stories are true, or at least interesting. As an avid listener to my grandfathers' stories about World War II -- many of which seem as embellished as Siu-bo's stories about fighting ninjas that can vanish into thin air -- I understand and fully appreciate the message at the heart of Fung's cracking good kungfu movie. It seems especially apropos in a film that owes so much and pays such close attention to the films of the generation before. In fact, to stick with the analogy about my grandfathers and World War II stories, it's easy to see the films of the 70s and 80s as "the greatest generation." Whenever anyone talks about the Golden Age, they inevitably point to these films. The next Jackie Chan, we say. The next Tsui Hark (if only Tsui Hark could be the next Tsui Hark). The next Chinese Ghost Story or A Better Tomorrow. And amid all that are the new films and new actors, largely dismissed, often disdained, living in the shadow of the greatest generation, looking at them with a mix of awe, contempt, and envy and the knowledge that they will never live up to but will always be compared to those films.

Also central to the plot are the two fathers, Siu-bo and Rocco, and different ways in which they have raised children adept at kungfu. Siu-bo trained his children hard, but there's a tenderness to his training as well. He does it because he knows one day someone might come for him, and by default them, and they'll be better off if they can defend themselves. For the most part, however, they are allowed to be regular young adults who regard their father as a bit of an oaf. Similarly, Rocco has trained his son in the martial arts, but in his case, it's to use him as an instrument of attack. And Rocco's son is an interesting juxtaposition to Nicky and Natalie. Where as both Nicky and Natalie are involved in active social lives (he works at a marine park, she is involved in school plays), Rocco's son is a shut-in who knows little beyond his PSP and staff fighting in the basement. He's like one of those anime otaku who collect martial arts weapons, except that he can actually use his.

Something that makes the script more complex than it might otherwise be, however, is the relationship between Rocco and his son. Rocco isn't necessarily a heartless villain. He's in a wheelchair because he was a special ops sniper assigned to assassinate some terrorist leader. However, an agent for the Hong Kong secret service needed said terrorist alive for a different assignment, and in order to prevent Rocco from killing the man (Rocco was working for the United States), he attacked and crippled him. Now all Rocco wants is revenge on the man who paralyzed him -- and Siu-bo happens to know who that agent is. So it's not like Rocco is simply evil -- and we see this when, after he's nearly killed in the final showdown, his son drops his staff and runs to protect and plead for his father's life. Obviously, Rocco isn't a complete dick, and the scene is nice even if Jake Strickland and Michael Wong are both bad actors.

House of Fury finds a way to embrace that as it reconcile its young protagonists with their father. With new and old talent both in front of and behind the camera, House of Fury is more than just a lot of fun (though it is certainly that); it's the closest we're going to get, in my opinion, to mixing the past with the present. It's not a ground-breaking film, but it's plenty enjoyable in the same gee-whiz way that the films of the 80s were., with al the same ham-handed goofiness and melodrama that people seem to forget was so omnipresent in those films. Sure, it doesn't best the best of the 1980s. It's not Dragons Forever or Project A. But if more new films were more like House of Fury -- fast-paced, action-packed, a blend of legit kungfu choreography and special effects, but also full of good humor and heart -- then maybe we wouldn't miss the past and bemoan the future quite so much.

As such, there was considerable pressure on Miike, both artistically and professionally, to prove that he wasn't out of the game so quickly. Never one to favor subtlety, Miike decided to more or less put all his chips on the table and throw himself into a mega-budget (for low budget filmmaking), special-effects laden fantasy film based on the yokai stories of old. The yokai -- a seemingly endlessly bizarre parade of creatures based on Japanese folklore and pure imagination of the authors -- found pop culture popularity in manga format as Ge Ge Ge No Kitaro, which was published in Shonen Magazine from 1966 until 1970, though it found a home in many other manga magazines with the word "shonen" in the title. Ge Ge Ge No Kitaro was about a young boy, Kitaro, with a host of magical abilities and the mission of reconciling the world of goblins and ghosts -- yokai -- with that of the humans. Kitaro's own father was a yokai (if I recall correctly) who died before Kitaro was born. However, possessed of a desire to keep an eye on his son, he literally keeps an eye on his son, becoming a disembodied eyeball that resides in Kitaro's empty left eye socket (which is usually covered by Kitaro's floppy hair). The comic was created by Mizuki Shigeru, and the town in which he lived serves as the backdrop for the story in Great Yokai War.

Ge Ge Ge No Kitaro made the leap to cartoon television show in 1968, and has enjoyed several reincarnations since then. I would love to see the original series get some attention stateside, especially since all I've ever seen of it are third generation bootleg VHS tapes with no subtitles. Still, a ratman with the power to expand his scrotum to hot air balloon proportions is an international language that needs no translation (sadly, said creature doesn't show up in Miike's film, though you just know he wanted him to). Both the manga and the anime owe a great deal to Mizuki Shigeru's interest in Japanese folklore, yokai, and the Shinto religion. The entire yokai mythology isn't entirely dissimilar to rural folklore from the west, in which a variety of spooks and goblins, both benevolent and evil, inhabit the world around us (but especially the woods).

Yokai are probably best known to Western fans thanks to three live-action films produced by Toei Studios in the late 60s and were absolutely packed to the gills with outlandish creatures, including the crowd-pleasing, jig-dancing bamboo umbrella with one eye, one foot, and a huge waggling tongue. I first saw one of these films back in 1993 or so, when my friend Pat got a tape from one of his friends, who had just returned from Japan. The tape was unsubtitled, of course, but it was pretty easy to figure out what was going on. And anyway, you hardly need a comprehensible language when your movie is crammed with kappa, dancing umbrellas, women with super extend-o necks, weird little guys who look like they have a turnip for a head, and all manner of other insane monsters. A couple years ago, those three movies found their way to domestic DVD, and I was happy to actually be able to understand what was going on -- to say nothing of finally seeing the other two yokai films, which until then I'd only seen bits of in the trailers that were on the old tape we had.

Things were pretty quiet on the yokai front for many a year, until Sakuya, Slayer of Demons came out and boasted a gratuitous but never the less welcome cameo appearance from the core yokai cast of yesteryear. Unfortunately, Sakuya is a fairly flawed film that mixes quality supernatural fantasy action with grating "little kid" humor that becomes well nigh insufferable thanks to the amount of self-indulgent whining. When a kid character is so bad that it can ruin guys with medieval bazookas fighting a giant spider woman, you know a line has been crossed.

When Miike dusted off yokai mythology for his movie, I can't say I was excited. I wasn't excited because, frankly, I'd just started a new job and I wasn't keeping up with the overseas entertainment industry, so I had no idea Miike was even making a yokai film until the dang thing came out and I started reading reviews. I've never been a huge Miike fan. I liked the Dead Or Alive films (even the oft-maligned third film), Fudoh, and Gozu. Visitor Q and Ichi the Killer bored me to tears, and everything else didn't do much more than elicit the response, "Eh." Oh, City of Lost Souls. I liked that one, even though it seems pretty well maligned, too. So the point is that I don't get all rabid and excited the way I do for, say, a new Sabu film (not to be confused with Miike's film, Sabu). Speaking of which -- what the hell, people? Every piece of crap Miike and Kitamura drop downt he back of their pants gets a "special edition" DVD in the United States, but no one has touched a single Sabu film? That's just flat-out insane. Even Kiyoshi Kurasawa films get DVD releases here (which is fine by me), and yet Dangan Runner, Drive, and all the others from Sabu remain MIA.

My take him or leave him attitude toward Miike thus established, I can admit that when I heard about Great Yokai War, I was pretty excited. All those monsters and potentially insane battles seemed like a perfect match for Miike. When I further heard that it was supposed to be a kid's film, I didn't fret. There are plenty of good kid's films, especially from Japan. When I heard that the main character was himself just a kid, my enthusiasm ebbed a bit. I was still smarting from that horribly annoying kid in Sakuya, and I wasn't itching at the opportunity to revisit that particular type of disappointment. Still, the recommendations kept flowing in, so I decided it was high time I checked out Miike's yokai blow-out myself.

Great Yokai War was conceived not so much as a remake as it was a celebration of the original film's 40th anniversary. Rather than acquiring the services of a tested children's film director, rights holder Kadokawa Group decided to snag grindhouse shock auteur Takashi Miike as director, a move that may remind some of you of Toho's decision to put cult film fave Ryuhei Kitamura in charge of the 50th anniversary Godzilla film. In my opinion, Kitamura's Godzilla film is an absolute disaster, but fans are sharply and vehemently divided on that topic. Would the yokai fair any better under the protection of a man best known for movies in which a whore is drown in a kiddie pool of her own feces, a middle-aged woman squirts gallon after gallon of milk from her breasts, or a woman gives graphic birth to a fully grown yakuza? It was a pretty bizarre decision, but that's only because the fact that Miike has made more innocent and sensitive fare (Bird People of China, Blues Harp, and even a previous kid's film, Andromedia) is often lost amid the jumble of exploding guts full of ramen noodles and giant robots with giant penises.

One of the other defining characteristics of Takashi Miike's oeuvre are the lengthy and often grindingly dull stretches of filler stuffed between more substantial set-pieces. These occur not so much because Miike has to pad out the running time as because Miike's genuinely wants to make actual plot and character development a part of his spectacle, and he just happens to fail at it more times than he succeeds. Still, points for ambition, and it's that ambition, even when he fails to realize it, that makes him a better writer and director that Kitamura, who is happy to dispense with character development and plot altogether and joyously embrace over-the-top non-stop action (which has worked to his advantage many times, and against him at others). But Kitamua and Miike both have shown a similar faltering over aspects of their stories that don't involve the gross-out gags or breakneck action. In their defense, this is hardly a problem that afflicts them alone. The question remained, though, how would Miike handle the narrative of a film of this scope? The scenario lends itself to making a Kitamura-style action blow-out, but the old yokai movies succeed primarily because the characters are charming and endearing.

The quick impression of Great Yokai War was that it was pretty good, but it wasn't as good as I had hoped. Shot on DV as most of Miike's work is, and heavily dependant on CGI for backgrounds, the film possessed a cheaper look than I wanted from it. Fortunately and unfortunately, CGI has made a quantum leap forward in terms of quality when it's used for backgrounds and set dressing, which means that when something is a bit crude, it's threadbare nature is all the more noticeable. The CGI work in Great Yokai War comes off as a tad clumsy, which seems a pretty silly criticism from me considering how much I enjoyed the patently ludicrous and unconvincing puppets and make-up that comprised the yokai themselves in the old films, as well as in this one. All things considered, it's a relatively minor quibble, but it just feel like the CGI could have been realized a bit better.

As a fan of the old films, I was also disappointed that the original gang of "primary" yokai are used for little more than cameo and background players in this new adventure. I know that's just me being stodgy, and I should be thankful that anyone at all wants to put a one-eyed, one-legged, tongue-waggling bamboo umbrella in a film, but I missed that thing having more of a role, to say nothing of the turnip-head thing with the grass skirt. I guess I should have learned some of the proper names of these monsters and ghosts. The kappa once again gets a major role, as he did in the old yokai film, and I really have no complaints about the astoundingly cute water nymph in the skimpy kimono playing a major role (do great legs, a beautiful face, and elf ears make up for weird green webbed hands and feet? I'll only know when I'm faced with the choice in real life, which should be soon, by my calculations), but besides her and the kappa, the rest of the main yokai cast are underdeveloped and underused. One of them is a flying shroud, another is a bellowing red-faced guy, and then there's a guy who obsesses about azuki beans. Most of these parts are filled by veteran Japanese actors, but half the time you'd be hard-pressed to recognize them if you didn't already known for whom you were looking.

Any fears that Miike is going to pull punches because this is a kid's film will be quickly dispelled by the beginning of the film, in which our young hero Tadeshi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) has a nightmare about the annihilation of Tokyo, highlighted by a psycho woman in a cheek-revealing white mini-dress (western audience fan fave Chiaki Kuriyama from Battle Royale, Azumi 2, and Kill Bill) and towering, snow-white beehive hairdo. We also get a small-town farmer discovering that his cow has given birth to a slimy, moaning calf with a vaguely humanoid face and a tendency to trill out portents of darkness and doom. Now this is the sort of kid's film I can get behind. As a fan of frightful and fanciful fare from a very young age (though I was terrified by Disney's Pinocchio), it always irritates me when a film is judged "too dark" or "too scary" for little kids. Those were exactly the sorts of movies I loved growing up, and it pains me that modern children are subjected to increasingly bland, insipid entertainment simply because someone, somewhere might think that a kid would get scared. Hey, guess what? Some kids think its fun to be scared. Others like to be wowed by Grimm's Fairytale style stories full of the macabre and menacing. Yeah, some kids will run screaming for the door, but I figure a parent should be a pretty good judge of what will scare and delight their child versus what will just terrify their kid and make them wet the bed. From the beginning I realized that, regardless of what I might think of it as an adult, Great Yokai War is exactly the sort of movie I'd embrace as a child. And I decided this before I'd even seen the sexy water nymph.

After a jarring intro that is signature Miike, the film settles down for the next hour or so in an attempt to get its cards in order before the 52-pickup free-for-all of the finale. Tadashi is a young boy who has moved to a rural village with his mother after a divorce. His father and older sister remained in Tokyo, though only his sister plays any part in the story. The father is a non-entity, undoubtedly a reflection of the MIA fathers who are committed entirely to work, much to the detriment and alienation of their wife and children. Tadashi is having a hard time adjusting to life in the village, where the local bullies pick on him for being a city slicker who ain't down with the ways of the tougher country folk. These being small-town Japanese bullies, they do things like encircle and taunt him lightly, as opposed to the rural elementary school bullies with which I was familiar in Kentucky, who would forego taunting and jump straight to shoving your head in a toilet or throwing coleslaw at you during lunch.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the bulk of humanity (humanity's utter obliviousness to the world around them is a lynchpin of the story), a grim-faced villain named Kato (Etsushi Toyokawa, playing it completely straight-laced despite the insanity of the situation) and his whip-wielding assistant Agi (Chiaki Kuriyama) have established a base inside a giant filth-belching industrial factory, where they use black magic to convert the kind and peace-loving yokai of nature into hideous Shinya Tsukamoto-style cyborgs covered with rust and grime and saw blades. Obviously, Great Yokai War is another in the long line of Japanese films with overt pro-environmental messages -- something I've always thought was as admirable as it was ironic coming from a country that dammed all its rivers and can't get enough delicious, delicious whale meat. Still, you can't really make a proper yokai film set in modern times without dealing with environmental concerns, as the yokai themselves are intrinsically tied to Japan's countryside and natural environment. Tackling a yokai story in the modern era means the domain of the goblins is going to be in direct conflict with modern society. Kato himself is a human who has become a demon. Incensed by the way humans use items then cast them away with total disregard, he has decided to harness the resentment and hatred in the world and use it usher in a new era of darkness.

At a village festival (during which we get a fleeting glimpse of a town square monument to Kitaro himself, a bronze statue which really exists and is part of the hundred-statue yokai monument in the town of Sakaiminato, which is also home to the Mizuki Shigeru Museum, which also makes an appearance in this film), Tadashi is chosen by the ceremonial kirin to be the Kirin Rider, the young lad in charge of defending the village from evil until the next festival. This would be a fun ceremonial post for a young boy to assume were it not for the fact that actual dark forces are threatening Tadashi's new home. Tadashi's grandfather (played by the legendary Bunta Sugawara, of Battles Without Honor and Humanity fame, among others), who alternates between bouts of lucidity and senility, seems to be the only one who understands that Tadashi's new title may be a bit more than a novelty, but it's hard to tell exactly how much he understands.

Things begin to get weird for Tadashi when he is told by the bullies that the Kirin Rider has to journey up to Goblin Cave to retrieve a sacred sword. Once again, although the yokai may be recognizably Japanese, the set-up of the story is universally familiar, or rather, it's familiar to anyone who grew up anywhere near the dark, menacing woods or a house that was rumored to be the home of a witch who ate little kids. It proves that, while the cosmetics of any given story may be particular to a certain country or people, a common chord runs through all the stories and gives them an instantly recognizable and universal appeal.

No sooner has Tadashi set out for Goblin Cave than the yokai start coming out in droves and Tadashi finds himself charged with learning how to be a true Kirin Rider and stopping Kato's apocalyptic scheme. The "chosen one" plot is pretty standard fare for the fantasy genre, in which a seemingly unprepared an incapable person is selected to be the "chosen one" and must discover the strength within and defeat the evil, so on and so forth. To Great Yokai War's credit, it never once actually uses the phrase "chosen one" or "chosen one foretold by the prophecy," so hats off to it for that. The magic, however, is rarely in the uniqueness of the story, but rather, in your execution of tried and true material. Takashi Miike splits his time between working well within the bounds of what we expect from a family-friendly fantasy and pushing it toward greater depths of maturity. The end result is never quite as thrilling as it should be, but it's still plenty fun and has to be commended for its attempt to be something more than just mindless kid's movie fluff.

For starters, there's the sexual tension underlying some of the action. Most obviously, you have Chiaki with her rear hanging out the back of a tiny micro-dress, snapping a whip and cackling hysterically (seems that has become her trademark). On the other hand, you have river nymph Kawahime (Mai Takahashi -- is she the same Mai Takahashi who got debunked as a fake psychic by James Randi, because if she is, that'd be pretty cool), who wears an open-sided tunic with nothing on underneath, showing off a lot of thigh that she doesn't seem to mind the young boy steal a caress of every now and then. Although perhaps sounding a bit inappropriate for a kid's movie, that's only because adults tend to forget what it's like to be a kid, especially an eleven-year-old boy who is just starting to discover, you know, those feelings. At the heart of Great Yokai War is the story of a boy exiting his boyhood and entering his teen years, on his way to becoming an adult. Obviously, some sort of sexual discovery, even one as restrained and innocent as it is here, is going to play a part in the kid's life. I don't know that an American film would take the same chance, which is funny given the voracious way in which American pop culture sexualizes the young.

In fact, it's this concentration on the age-old "boy becomes a man, or at least less of a whiny little kid" motif that gives Great Yokai War it's most effective and surprisingly poignant moment: after the great yokai war has been waged (which is actually a war between a kid, a couple yokai, and a crazy evil guy, with the rest of the yokai just sort of showing up as spectators and revelers), Tadashi has retired his obligations as the Kirin Rider and done some growing up. The fuzzy little yokai who becomes his closest friend (realized via a very crudely animatronic plush toy, which for some reason didn't bug me as much as the crude CGI) tries desperately to get his attention, but Tadashi is a man now, and with maturity he loses the ability to see the yokai who played such a significant role in his life.

The moment is badly undercut by Miike's inclusion of a pointless zinger to open the door for a sequel, but I can almost overlook that based on the strength of the scene otherwise. Since the theme of humans discarding the things of their past plays such an important role in propelling the action, it makes the journey from youth to maturity even more effective. In fact, that theme works on a surprising number of levels. On the surface, there's the simple concept of humans throwing stuff away and polluting the planet, and those things coming back to haunt us. Or eat us. Whatever. On a deeper level, there's the idea that musty old folklore characters like the yokai are being discarded by modern society -- both by the simple act of the society in the story moving on and becoming less in tune with natural surroundings and the spirits who inhabit them, as well as in the real world, where kids seeking modern entertainment have no real interest in a bunch of weirdos from a manga series that was popular in the 1960s. And finally, you have the concept of discarding the things you cherished in your past as you enter adulthood. It's a moment perfectly realized, as corny or weird as it may sound, by a cute little fuzzy critter who looks like a toy trying to get the attention of a young man who once cherished him but has since moved on.

Counterbalancing Tadashi's journey is a journalist who was saved as a young boy by Kawahime and has spent the rest of his life trying in vain to recapture that moment and relive his past. He's a particularly interesting idea (though not an especially well realized character, unfortunately) in an era where much of our adulthood is dedicated to recapturing and romanticizing our childhood (romanticizing largely taking the form of pretending like every single thing that ever happened during the 70s or 80s played a significant role in our lives and constitutes a beloved memory, instead of admitting the reality of the situation, which is that 80% of everything you see on VH1 wasn't that important to you as a kid no matter what commentators born ten years after the date being discussed might be telling you). Although I didn't think his character came of as interesting as he should have been, the journalist does boast the film's best comedic scene, when in the midst of the great yokai royal rumble and all this talk of Kirin Riders, he is being pushed and battered by ghosts he cannot see, at least until he discovers a crate of Kirin Ichiban beer and begins drinking himself silly, at which time he can see the yokai once more (which, aside from being funny and brilliant use of product placement ties in nicely with the common idea that aside from kids, only senile old folks -- like Tadashi's grandfather -- and the town loony can experience the fantasy world, probably because they have been reduced in one way or another to a more accepting and childlike state of mind).

Themes of lost youth and environmental destruction aside, we can evaluate Great Yokai War from a purely action-adventure standpoint. You'd think this would be Miike's strong point, and that he'd be weak on the bittersweet exploration. In fact, the opposite is true. The action is not especially bad or good. It's just never compelling. There's a great battle in the Goblin Cave involving Tadashi, the giant goblin King Tengu (Miike regular Kenichi Endo), Agi, and her army of chainsaw-armed industrial robots, the final showdown between Kato and Tadashi is surprisingly lackluster (though I do like that it's a happy bean that wins the day), though there is a nice thematic continuity in the finale, as Kato randomly discards Agi in the same way humans discard their possessions. The big throwdown between the vast population of yokai who descend upon Tokyo thinking that a festival of darkness is begin staged is clever (the yokai never even seem to realize they're actually fighting a war with Kato's mechanized demons)

There are other clever bits thrown in that show Miike really put a lot of time and effort into writing the script (the first time he gets screenwriting credit, if I'm not mistaken). When Kato's demonic creation (the entire factory becomes a huge demon, in one of the film's moments of good CGI) descends upon Tokyo, a man dismisses the confusion outside by casually quipping that, "It's only Gamera." In a moment of darker humor, a panicking provincial policeman attempts to shoot a rampaging mecha-beast, but his aim is so poor that he misses the monster entirely and manages to hit the monster's intended human victim square between the eyes. Less successful is the comic relief courtesy of the kappa (a turtle-like humanoid, played by Japanese comedian Sadao Abe, who also appeared in Higuchinsky's excellent surrealist horror film, Uzumaki), though he does manage to score a laugh or two, which is more than you can say for most comic relief.

The acting is uniformly good, and each of the players who inhabit the yokai manage to make them human but also bizarrely inhuman. They're familiar, but you can't fully relate to them. The yokai are realized primarily through the use of old-fashioned make-up, masks, and puppetry, though a few are rendered or assisted by CGI, such as the woman with the snakelike neck, the paper wall with eyes, and maybe the stone wall that walks and talks (yokai can get pretty far-out). Kawahime is the most complex of the goblins, aside from being the hottest even with her weird amphibian hands. She began life as a discarded effigy and was rescued by Kato, only to spurn his offer to join him in destroying humanity. At the same time, she is torn between her resentment of mankind and her love for those she saves from drowning. As the young hero Tadashi, Ryunosuke Kamiki manages to avoid being annoying for most of the time, though Miike doesn't seem to have much more for him to do than stumble around and yell a lot. The yelling gets kind of tiresome, even if that's what a kid would really be likely to do when confronted with a massive host of goblins and chainsaw-wielding cyborgs. Still, when he's allowed to, he rises to the occasion and makes for a relatively painless pre-teen hero.

Great Yokai War just barely misses being a great film, but there's really no shame in merely being a very good film. Miike's pacing is still uneven, and while he succeeds with some character development, he fails at other times, making for some spots that drag. The yokai are never as fully realized characters as they should be, with the exception of Kawahime. It's nice to see so many old familiar faces -- both human and yokai -- and as a nostalgia trip (there's that lost youth thing again), Great Yokai War is a lot of fun. As a kid, I would have loved it. As an adult, struggling to remember youth, I merely liked it a lot. Whatever the case, it's a triumphant return for Miike, and with a film that was apparently very near and dear to his heart. I my not have like dit quite as much as I'd hoped, and it has it flaws, but all in all, Great Yokai War is a madcap good time at the movies.

Oldboy comes to the west with a considerable amount of fanfare, having garnered awards at Cannes, as if such awards mean anything at all these days. I think at some point, every single film ever made will have won some sort of an award. Suffice it to say, there hasn't been a Korean film with this much stateside buzz surrounding it since Shiri and My Sassy Gal stormed the scene a couple years ago. And once again, what we have on our hands is a very cliche film in which everything that needs to happen does, but is presented so expertly that the end result is a hugely entertaining foray into an increasingly twisted tale of revenge. If Shiri was the Korean film industry doing the Hollywood action film several magnitudes better and more violent, then Oldboy is the same industry's response to the popularity of the genre-bending master of the sicko revenge film, Takashi Miike.

Drunken oaf Oh Dae-su (Shiri's Choi Min-sik) is bailed out of jail one night by a friend. On the way home to see his little daughter and wife after his night of carousing and doubtlessly drinking a lot of Hienekin and wrapping his tie around his head, Dae-su simply vanishes. He wakes up in a fortified hotel room, with absolutely no idea where he is, why he's there, or who is doing this to him. He is there for fifteen years until one day, the very same day he has finally completed a tunnel to the outside through his wall, he is given a new set of clothes and a fat wad of cash and simply released without any explanation whatsoever. Completely lost as to what has just happened to him, he vows to track down the people who did this to him and extract some answers by any means necessary.

It's a lean but exceptional premise for a film, indeed something that would seem right at home in a Miike or Hitchcock film, or even a Raymond Chandler novel. Oldboy possesses the same kind of quirky lack of balance that inhabits those works. It isn't long before Dae-su has managed to trace his way back to the hotel prison, and it doesn't even take that long to go fromt here to the person who paid to have him imprisoned. Oldboy's central mystery isn't who, but why. Dae-su must find out why he was imprisoned, first because the need to know is burning him up, and later because a sushi chef with whom he has struck up an awkward romantic relationship is placed under threat of death. Slowly, however, the film shifts focus even from that quest and we discover that Dae-su's revenge against his captors is secondary to the complicated revenge plot that has been hatched against him for reasons he can't understand. As he progresses from one clue, one fractured memory to the next, the revelations create an increasingly twisted and sick picture of what's happening.

Oldboy draws its strength primarily from the atmosphere. The slick direction by Chan-wook Park (JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) not only result sin a gorgeous, colorful film, but it greatly augments the feeling of bewilderment and anger engulfing Dae-su. The slow move from a simple tale of revenge into territory that is truly bizarre is perfectly accomplished, once again illustrating that the best way to unsettle someone is to take a very familiar world and subtly, slowly warp it into something alien and grotesque. Oldboy does this so well that you hardly even notice that the film is getting increasingly sicker with each fragment of a clue that is recovered. Although Miike would seem to me to be the obvious inspiration for this type of film, Park's steady approach resists the gory excesses and lack of focus that identify Miike's films, which is why I feel it's apt to say Oldboy falls somewhere between Miike and Hitchock, or a particularly surreal old hardboiled detective novel. The web of ever-more perverse characters and realizations wouldn't be entirely out of place in a Raymond Chandler novel, populated as they were by pornographers, drunks, lecherous scumbags, and decadent California aristocracy. When the final pieces of Dae-su's torture snap into place, it isn't entirely unexpected -- I'd guessed what the revelation would be already -- but it's unsettling and effective regardless.

Although there is action in the film, it's hardly an action film. Having nothing better to do while locked in a hotel room for fifteen years, Dae-su decides to get into shape. One of the central elements to the overarching themes of the film is the transformation that takes place in Dae-su. When we first meet him, he's not necessarily a bad guy. He's just a useless chump. As wrong as what happens to him is, it's never the less responsible for transforming him into an entirely different type of person: physically fit, focused, determined. At the same time, we get the sense that this transformation has been engineered for him specifically so that he'll have so much more to lose when the hammer falls. His sudden explosion from being more or less entombed alive to being free means that every emotion, every feeling, every event is possessed of much greater power than would otherwise be. One of the first things he does upon obtaining his freedom is go to a sushi bar and order something, anything that is alive.

So although this is a character study more than an action film, the nature of Dae-su's heightened awareness of everything around him means that he's going to explode into fits of rage from time to time, especially when someone is standing in the way of him obtaining the next level of truth. There are a few fight scenes, and a couple particularly sadistic torture scenes that don't quite plumb the gratuitous depths of Takashi Miike at his most insane but are never the less grueling to behold. But, as with the series of increasingly twisted revelations, none of the violence seems out of place. The man has been locked up for fifteen years, after all, in solitary confinement, with no explanation as to why. He's bound to be a little frazzled, and within the context of his character, everything he does makes sense. Still, dental work performed by hammer is pretty intense.

When the hammer does fall, it's precisely because Dae-su is now focused and driven that he gets deeper and deeper into the secrets that lie behind his imprisonment and, consequently, the revelations that will conspire to destroy his present. These revelations never come across as contrived or happening simply because something needs to happen to propel the script along to its climax. The screenplay by Jo-yun Hwang andChun-hyeong Lim is perfectly paced and presents each layer as an organic and entirely believable outgrowth of the previous, even during the end when things begin to get exceptionally complex and a little far-fetched. Within the confines of the film's internal logic, however, they make perfect sense and remain solidly believable.

The film is peppered with bits and pieces of comedy, but it never dominates the situation, and the film remains for the most part, tensely paced and hauntingly grim. It's obvious almost from the beginning that no good is going to come of anything that happens in the film, and Dae-su is a sympathetic enough character that the knowledge that this is all going to end badly for him keeps you involved in the story. The villain of the piece, Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) is acceptably freaky, but the film relies largely on the talents of Hye-jeong Kang as cute, beleaguered sushi chef Mi-do, who finds herself thrust into Dae-su's life seemingly at random, though the viewer knows it's very unlikely that anything happening to Dae-su is happening at random. Her career is really only just beginning, but she turns in a strong performance here, matching up very well with the far more experienced and accomplished Min-sik Choi. You know bad things are probably going to happen to her as well, and you really just don't want them to.

All in all, quite a nerve-wracking though enjoyable film. I really like Park's direction in this movie. It's slick without indulging into overkill. The color palette goes for the over-saturated, ultra-rich look that is enjoying increasing popularity, a welcome change for me from all the washed-out or blue/yellow tinted films we've been suffering through the past few years. It works to make the very normal world around Dae-su seem not quite right, as if there is something off-kilter and sinister and somewhat fairytale-like about it, albeit one of those fairytales where everyone ends up cooked by witches or eaten by trolls. After watching a string of really awful Korean sci-fi films that looked beautiful but were almost impossible to watch (Yesterday and Natural City), it was nice to see another Korean film that doesn't skimp on cutting edge production but also remembers to wrap it around a compelling, intensely tragic, and haunting movie

The Hong Kong New Wave sort of kicked itself off in the beginning of the 1980s with two big events. The first was the teaming up of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao in the film Project A, which pretty much forever changed the way martial arts in particular and action in general would be staged. The second event was the release of Tsui Hark's special effects blow-out Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. Zu was the first film to make use of "Star Wars like" special effects, and with its completion, Tsui Hark had forever changed the fantasy film in the same way Jackie, Sammo, and Biao changed more conventional action films.

In 1986, marginal director John Woo, who was best known for a series of rather unfunny comedy films during the 1970s, completed the revolution when he tried his hand at gangster films in the form of A Better Tomorrow. Although Woo's highly stylized, melodramatic gangster epics were the last innovation of the New Wave, the tsunami carried Hong Kong through most of the 1980s and well into the 1990s. It finally sputtered and died around 1996 or so, when with the exception of Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle films, everything seemed to become as awful as they had previously been great. The Golden Era was over, and fans were forced to settle for a nauseating stream of erotic thrillers and copycat "young triad guy" movies. Fans of martial arts films were basically left watching Donnie Yen speed himself up to about 1000 miles an hour in some of the worst films of all time.

Things seem to be turning around, albeit very slowly, with the release of entertaining and inventive films like Storm Riders and Chine Ghost Story: The Animation. But for the most part, fans of Hong Kong cinema who aren't interested in the latest Wong Jing film with a title like Rape Squad or Rapist Union, or Rape Rape Rape Rape Rape and Tits have to look to the past to find quality work.

One of the overlooked films of the good ol' days is this live-action adaptation of the violent Japanese comic book, Crying Freeman. Director Clarence Ford opts to remove most, but not all, of the sex and nudity that populated the comic book, and replace it with more action and kungfu. Ford also worked closely with Film Workshop masters Dean Shek and Tsui Hark, and Hark's stylistic touch is all over the film like incriminating fingerprints. But hey, that's okay with me, because I generally like Hark's work.

Sam Hui, best known as a member of the successful comedy troupe that included his two brothers, Michael and Ricky, became a big-time film star via the action-packed slapstick spy caper series, Aces Go Places. Hui is a likable guy who some people mistake for Jackie Chan, probably because they have the same nose. Not literally the same nose of course, but similar looking noses. Hui was also popular as a pop star during the 1970s, and from what I've heard of his stuff, he specialized in sappy ballads and acoustic songs. For some reason, his star seemed to falter after this movie, which is too bad because he really shines.

Hui plays a man visiting Russia with his girlfriend, former action/comedy star turned respectable arthouse name, Maggie Cheung. Aside from witnessing a brutal fight between two guys in a subway, the trip seems to go quite well until Hui becomes the target of a mysterious man with a fucked-up croaky voice. The man is the trainer for the 800 Dragons, a secret society of assassins. Hmm, I guess all assassin societies have to be secret. You wouldn't get very far in the field if you were a very open and obvious society of assassins. It would be like being a ninja, but wearing a headband that says "Ninja" on it in big red letters.

Hui is captured and has his memory erased. During his training, be is befriended by the master's assistant, a cute and wily young woman named Pearl who has the ability to fly, more or less, or at least jump in really cool ways. And she is really good with her feet, to say the least. Hui doesn't really take any of it seriously, opting instead to be the archetypal "naughty kungfu student" despite his obvious potential. It's only when his pal, Pearl, is killed during a fight with rival assassins that Hui starts to take things more seriously. He gets the back tattoo, the mask, and the attitude that makes him the Crying Freeman, so named because he sheds a tear after each assassination.

His career as a secret super assassin is filled with cool fight sequences. Purists will be put off by some of the wire work, but it's integrated well and doesn't look goofy, at least not to me. The fights are fast paced, full of acrobatics, and just plain slick. During a mission in Hong Kong, however, his old flame Maggie catches a glimpse of him, and although he is wearing the mask, she thinks she recognizes him. He pays her a visit and recreates one of the most famous scenes from the comic book, in which he assumes the framed pose of a painting his girlfriend was making. The reunion is quickly broken up when vengeful thugs crash in on them. Maggie is shot by Freeman's own assistant, who wants to protect the secret of his identity and eliminate any chance of him regaining his memory. Either that, or he had to sit through Irma Vep.

One of the movies best scenes, and it has several, is when Freeman and his associates seek revenge on the renegade assassins who killed Pearl. The fight takes place in a church, and as if the sight of Nina Li Chih, who plays Freeman's partner, dressed as a gun-toting nun isn't enough reason to justify the movie, then I don't know what is. Anyway, you have to see the thing for full effect, but the shots of masked assassins perched atop cathedral steeples and crosses are a fantastic visual.

The movie follows it up with another short but cool scene in which Freeman battles Nina Li Chih in a shower. She is not happy with Maggie still being alive and posing a threat to Freeman's identity. Thus, Freeman himself becomes a rogue. For Maggie Cheung, I'm sure any man, and probably most women, would gladly suffer the ire of an ancient secret society of assassins and be happy about it - as long as she promised to never make a movie like Irma Vep again.

While Nina and the assistant decide to help Freeman out, the rest of the society, including the old master, are not as forgiving. The finale sees Freeman face off with his teacher in a truly spectacular fight sequence that still wows me nearly nine years after I first saw it.

I absolutely love this movie. It has a good story, and perhaps best of all, is jam-packed with creativity and wild action. I know some Crying Freeman fans were put off by the amount of comedy in the film's first half, but I think it helps make everyone more human and believable, even when they are flying over churches and engaging in insane kungfu fights. It also helps the film's finale pack more of an impact.

The best thing about this movie is the visual style. The masks and set-pieces are very nice, and the action sequences are stylish and unique. It's too bad they don't make them like this one anymore. But at least they made it once.

Clouse, who incidentally hated Bruce Lee, chose to work with Jim Kelly. John Saxon went on to appear in Cannibal Apocalypse. Kelly and Clouse made Black Belt Jones, a film that straddles two worlds, being both a martial arts film and a black action film. Not a bad move considering that the biggest audience in America was (and probably still is) black.

Kelly, a fellow Kentuckian who, unlike me, sported a perfectly spherical afro I consider one of the very best of the 1970s, plays Jones, a secret agent who has gone into semi-retirement, concentrating instead on teaching the martial arts to inner city youths. The karate school is run by a kindly old coot named Pops (Scatman Crothers). I don't know exactly how Scatman Crothers got involved in the martial arts, but there he is. His gambling debts, however, bring the local thug, Pinky, down on him. I don't know. Scatman Crothers, master of kungfu -- something about it just doesn't seem to click.

To make matters worse, Pinky is then hired by some white thugs who want to get a hold of the property Pops' school occupies so they can build a shopping mall. When things get heavy, Black Belt Jones leaps into action. Only he's not alone. Pops daughter, Sidney, shows up to lend a hand, proving herself every bit as agile and powerful a martial artist as Jones.

Sidney is played by Gloria Hendry, whose biggest role was in the James Bond film Live and Let Die, which also starred Yaphet Kotto. And some other guy. Some British guy. Who cares? Anyway, in that film, Gloria wasn't given much of a chance to show what a bad-ass she was. She just got killed by one of those novelty coconut head things you can buy along the road in Florida and other states with palm trees. Yaphet and Mr. Saturday were pretty much the owners of cool in that film. But here, Hendry gets to kick ass in a major way, even in her panties (to be fair, Jim Kelly is in his little boxer shorts as well). She kicks ass, and looks good doing it. Not as good as Jada Pinkett-Smith, though, but few people look that good.

Okay, enough youthful lusting. Black Belt Jones is a pretty good movie. It's not great, but it's a lot of fun. With the exception of Enter the Dragon, it's better than any of the other crap the Fred Weintraub/Robert Clouse duo cranked out.

Not that being a better movie than China O'Brien is a major feather in the cap. Plenty of action, Gloria Hendry and Jim Kelly fighting in their skivvies, and a healthy dose of comedy make for a fun ride. And hell, the movie has a scene where Gloria's panties blow out the window of the car and land on Pinky's windshield, to which Pinky angrily exclaims, "Is that fool throwing panties at me?!?!"

Jones himself is an interesting character, very much like John Shaft in the film Shaft ("Shaft's his name, Shaft's his game"). He more or less works for The Man, the Establishment. But at the same time, is hip enough to toy with them and remain with one foot outside of their system. A more recent version of the same character is Eddie Murphey in the original Beverly Hills Cop. All three characters are part of mainstream society while at the same time being outsiders who frequently show up and confound their white counterparts.

Unlike most American martial arts stars, Jim Kelly looks good in action. His build is not unlike Bruce Lee, only topped with a big round afro, and although he's not as quick as Lee, his action scenes are still crisp, exciting and better than anything anyone else from America has pulled off. I like watching Jim Kelly films, not just because he is from Kentucky, and Black Belt Jones is my favorite.

Jim gets to do plenty of ass-kicking, including a wild final fight in an auto body shop. Black Belt Jones and Sydney get to frolick around in panties and boxers while kicking ass on the thugs amid a seemingly endless flood of frothy soap bubbles. It's pretty silly stuff, but plenty of fun. The only bad part of the confrontation is the obvious Jim Kelley stunt double, whose skin is much darker than Kelley's, sort of like the "nude scene" Tia Careere had in Showdown in Little Tokyo, where when she took her clothes off, her face was magically obscured by her hair and her breasts seem to grow three sizes. Not that I'm sitting around by myself in my apartment staring at Tia's boobs. No. It was all in the name of research, you see. I did it for you.

Have you ever noticed that during the late '70s, it seemed like the Mafia was spending a lot of time trying to shut down martial arts schools or community centers that had martial artists involved with them in some way. What was up with that? You'd think the Mafia would have more to do than hassle karate guys. I must admit however, it would have been cool if, in Godfather II, Michael Corlionne said something like, "We have to take care of our Vegas operation. Now what's this I hear about Pops and his kungfu school?"

For the record, the Mafia guys in this movie, which was made in a time before racial or personal sensitivty prohibited such lines as, "Well, you want me, don't you? Or are you some kind of faggot?" spend most of their time sitting around, eating spaghetti, and talking in wildly exaggerated Italian accents, yelling things like, "Mama mia! This is a-good-a spaghetti!"

This film is so good that it actually hurts to think about it. I am pretty sure this is another Mainland Chinese film, though I could be wrong. If not, these guys simply rule the martial world, and I wish we got to see more of their films. Zhang Yi-who?

The film follows the exploits of a acrobat and acting troupe called the Red Dragons. En route to a gig, they are cornered by a vile lackey who insists they come perform for his even more vile master. The Dragons politely refuse, as they already have a commitment, but offer to catch him next time around.

Well obviously, this causes the evil-doers to do what the do best, which is evil. They attack and pursue the troupe mercilessly, until the actors hook up with some testy Shaolin monks who teach them to fight better. Then they all go out into a field to delight us.

And delight they do. This is some of the best pure martial arts choreography you'll find outside of a late 1970s Sammo Hung film. It's absolutely breath-taking. The entire film is packed with nonstop action and martial arts, all of it good. This another of the great martial arts films that people seem to ignore. Their loss, because it is one of the best ever.

It's no secret that since the tail-end of the 1990s the Hong Kong film industry has had a rough time. After being gutted by gangsters for decades and plagued by the most rampant video piracy in the world resulting in films being available on bootleg VCD before they even opened in theaters, Hong Kong's once illustrious cinematic juggernaut found itself on thin financial ice. Big stars were either getting to old to perform as they once had or were simply packing up and heading for the greener pastures of America. The new generation of stars, culled primarily from the ranks of teen models and pop idols, did little to spark interest in the new generation of films.

Rough times for the industry means rough times for fans as well. Here in the United States, folks were hit with the double whammy of there being very few films worth seeing, and the few that were worth seeing were often snapped up by domestic distributors like Disney and Miramax, who would then do one of two things. They'd either stick the film in their vaults and forget about it, effectively eliminating it from circulation in the United States, or they'd do a horrendous dub chop, cut the film to ribbons, and mix in a cheap hip-hop soundtrack, being certain to include the song "Kungfu Fighting" by Carl Douglas in any and every Asian film possible. I really wonder at this point if the people who decide to put that song in these movies think they're the first to do it. Did they miss the last ten releases from their same company using the same song? Will the hilarity never be exhausted?

Of course, die-hard fans could always shop overseas and find most (but not all) titles available online in their original language and uncut, widescreen format. It was still a lot of hassle just to see a subpar film like Legend of Zu. Luckily, nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of decent new films, the void was filled by the past.

When Celestial Entertainment announced they'd inked a deal to release everything in the vaults of the Shaw Brothers studio onto DVD, complete with digital remastering, subtitles, and extras, many people had a "believe it when I see it" attitude. After all, such a deal seemed far too good to be true. The Shaw Brothers, of course, were one of the premiere studios in the history not just of Hong Kong cinema, but of global cinema as a whole. Along with Cathay Studios, the Shaw Brothers defined Hong Kong cinema and helped create what many consider the Golden Age during the 50s and 60s. Unfortunately, after their initial release into theaters, the vast majority of Shaw Brothers films disappeared, locked away in secret vaults and jealously guarded like some crazy long-haired drunken monk guards the manual for his secret style of Wild Toad Kungfu. A few titles snuck out in badly cropped formats with those subtitles where only about four words are visible and the rest run off the sides and bottom of the screen. More made it into the bootleg realm, also in inferior formats and often dubbed and edited. And even those that did make it out were almost exclusively the kungfu films of Chang Cheh and Liu chia-liang - fine films, but a tiny smattering of what lie hidden somewhere out there near Clearwater Bay.

In December of 2002, however, dreams became a reality, and the first batch of remastered Shaw Brothers films hit the DVD market. Suddenly, the dearth of quality new productions seemed less important. As long as Celestial kept a steady stream of old classics coming our way, it didn't really matter that new films offered nothing worth taking note of. There were more than enough unearthed classics to keep fans busy for years, and with such an aggressive release schedule (they do have over 700 films to get through, after all), there'd be little down time between waves of rediscovered treasure.

Initially, I'd been excited primarily about the idea of getting my hands on beautiful copies of all my old favorites. The first day, however, my focus shifted dramatically, and I fond myself far more excited about the prospect of delving into the unknown, the films and directors and stars I'd never seen before. And there are plenty of them. From weepy melodrama to pop-art go-go musical extravaganzas, I was in for one treat after another. And one of the yummiest treats was discovering, at long last, the films of Chu Yuan, aka Chor Yuen.

Chor Yuen is probably most recognizable as the evil Mr. Koo from Jackie Chan's Police Story. Before he was whacking Jacking with an umbrella and causing him to fall off speeding double-decker busses, Chor Yuen made a name for himself as one of the most accomplished and artistic martial arts directors in movie history. Where most kungfu films were happy to point the camera at a couple guys and let them wave their arms in each other's faces, Yuen was determined to maintain and build upon the more stylish, lyrical, and poetic artistic approach of early masters like King Hu while throwing in plenty of visual flare that seems to have been derived from ground-breaking Italian productions like those of Mario Bava: lots of mist, splashes of brilliant color and surreal lighting, and unique use of the camera as something more than just a thing to point at people.

Equally detailed are the sets employed in each film. While cheaper, less ambitious films just plopped the hero and villain down on top of that grassy hill or the rock quarry looking thing where 90% of all kungfu fights in the 1970s took place, Yuen placed his films amid lavish sets that became as essential to the film as the characters themselves and help lend to them a dreamlike elegance missing from so many of the more straight-forward films of the era. Each scene looks like a painting, filled with swirling mists, swaying cherry blossoms, and flowing silks. Yuen's "villain lairs" were often more outlandish and inventive than anything seen even in the wildest dreams of the old Batman series. They were caves full of spooky lighting and boiling pits of fire, or temples filled with sparkling gems and booby traps.

The final piece of Yuen's puzzle comes in the form of fabulously labyrinthine plots where every single person has something to hide, nothing is what it seems, and everyone will be crossed and double crossed as often as possible. Part fever dream, part detective novel, the stories behind Yuen's films were often the handiwork of famed martial arts novelist Lung Ku. Martial arts adventure novels in China have always been astoundingly complex, filled with hundreds of characters and sometimes dozens of main characters. Most famous among the classic tales is The Water Margin, also known as Heroes of the Marsh and 108 Heroes. These novels have served as the basis for scores of movies including new wave classics like Swordsman (written by Louis Cha) and Golden Age gems like Brave Archer (also from the pen of Lung Ku). Despite the era and despite the author, all the film's share the traditional love of complex, sometimes confounding plots.

Previously, deciphering the events in one of these movies was a Herculean chore. The only versions available were often cropped on the edges so that fully half the action fell off the screen, and subtitles went with the picture. For any given line of dialogue, you were lucky to get three or four words that didn't drop off the bottom or the side edges of the screen. Thus, if any character said something more complex than "Yes," or "Kill him!" you were in trouble. Since films of this nature offered so many twists and turns and so many characters with secret identities and agendas, keeping track of the plot was well nigh impossible. Luckily, the DVD releases of these films rectify the situation, providing viewers with the full scope of action and subtitles that are actually placed in a position where you can see them. From time to time, even this doesn't make some of the more outrageous plot twists any more comprehensible, but at least we're in a better position to enjoy what's going on. And what better place than one of Chor Yuen's coolest films to begin?

Ti Lung stars in Clans of Intrigue as the accomplished swordsman Chu Liu-hsiang. His heroics and reputation have earned him a life of luxury which he spends in his decked-out palatial boat where he is attended to by three drop-dead sexy female assistants, not unlike Derek Flint or L. Ron Hubbard. His idyllic life is upset when a maiden from the Palace of Magic Water (played by Bruce Lee film veteran Nora Miao) arrives to accuse him of murder. Seems that someone has assassinated the leaders of three of the great martial arts clans, and the word around that ever-tumultuous Martial World is that Chu is the man responsible for these heinous deeds.

Determined to clear his name and unmask the true killer, Chu sets off on a investigative quest that bring shim into contact with a variety of clans and killers, all of whom seem to have some strange secret that connects them to the murders. Along the way, he first fights and then befriends a swordsman for hire (played by the impressive Ling Yun) and the daughter of one of the slain clan leaders. He's also badgered at every turn by a mysterious masked killer in red and a variety of icily beautiful hit women from the Palace of Magic Water, who are lead by Betty Pei Ti. And did I mention the mysterious monk or the subplot about orphaned ninjas?

Clans of Intrigue, like most Chor Yuen - Lung Ku collaborations, keeps the viewer guessing primarily by providing a twist at every single opportunity. While it's not always the most logical turn of events, it certainly keeps you watching and paying attention. Unlike the more brutal kungfu dramas of Chang Cheh, Chor Yuen emphasizes story and characters over kungfu action. Ti Lung is more than up for the challenge of carrying a character-driven story, even though his character is in many ways the least complex. Ti Lung was always one of the best all-around performers at the Shaw Bros studios. He was handsome, majestic, and equally adept at drama, comedy, and deadly kungfu action - all of which he gets to display here. The character of Chu Liu-hsiang is rarely serious or at a loss for words, and his reaction to everything seems to be to smirk, make a joke, then kick some ass. It's nice to see him in a role unlike hi usual Chang Cheh roles, where he would invariably have to take off his shirt and get stabbed in the belly.

His polar opposite is the mysterious swordsman in black played by the enigmatic Ling Yun. With motives less pure than those of his compatriot, Yuen's grim killer-for-hire is the straight-man of the duo. The rest of the cast round out the film nicely. Nora Miao is as beautiful as she is talented, and Chor Yuen always gives his female characters something interesting to do - another of the many things that set him apart from his contemporary Chang Cheh and links him more to past masters such as King Hu (who, incidentally, directed Yuen Hua alongside Cheng Pei-pei in the ground-breaking Come Drink With Me) or another of Shaw's up and coming directors, Liu Chia-liang -- who made a hero out of Kara Hui Ying-hung when very few heroic female characters existed in the Chang Cheh dominated kungfu films. After the trendiness of wu xia (fantastic swordsman) films wore off and was replaced in the 1970s by grittier, more brutal, and less lyrical kungfu films, female heroines tended to disappear from Shaw Bros martial arts epics, thanks primarily to Chang Cheh's domination of the market. He was much more interested in male bonding than in women, and his films reflect his own macho tastes. Contrary to reports that Shaw Bros. producer Mona Fong was the driving force behind eliminating women from heroic leading roles (out of jealousy, as the story goes), it seems the blame lies far more on Chang Cheh. It wasn't until Chor Yuen and Liu Chia-liang became the dominant forces behind the studio's martial arts films that we saw a return of the valiant female fighter.

As the heroic Black Pearl, Shaw Bros stalwart Ching Li is simply wonderful. With her "best friend's cute little sister" good looks and quality acting chops honed in dramatic roles like the schizophrenic young woman in When Clouds Roll By, Ching Li was a real force to be reckoned with. Chor Yuen was certainly fond of her, and he used the talented young actress in both Clans of Intrigue and Legend of the Bat as well as Killer Clans, Magic Blade, and the director's comedic blockbuster House of 72 Tenants among others. She also has the distinction of being one of the only female stars to every carve a decent character out of a Chang Cheh film, that of the doomed woman in Blood Brothers. She also got to do some ass-kicking in Chang's early Ti Lung - David Chiang "spaghetti western" kungfu film Anonymous Heroes. Her mixture of true acting ability and athletic prowess made her one of the most versatile and enjoyable to watch female stars in Shaw Bros film history -- quite a feat when youn consider that puts her int he company of women like dramatic actress Linda Lin Dai, Ivy Ling Po, Lily Li, and kungfu superstar Hui Ying-hung.

The venerable Yueh Hua stars as Ti Lung's friend and ally, Monk Wu Hua. As with nearly everyone else in the film, he is far more than he appears to be, and his role in the story keeps you guessing as to his true motives and history. Yueh Hua plays the character with a wonderful subtlety that imminently displays why he was considered one of the Shaw Bros. most treasured performers. Few and far between are the films with such an impressive ensemble cast of men and women who are actually allowed by the story to live up to their potential as both characters and actors.

Another of Chor Yuen's trademarks was his eye for beauty and his tendency to add a little flesh and spice to his films. A naked female rear here, the glimpse of a breast there did a lot to titillate viewers even though it was shot with the same striking artistry as the rest of his film. Clans of Intrigue is no exception to the rule, and Yuen serves up some decidedly adult fare with the lesbian overtones between Nora Miao and Betty Pei Ti. In fact, there are versions of the film that contain a steamy kiss between the two women, though that particular instance is missing from the official cut of the film as was presumably only added for international distribution. Its absence, and the absence of a flash of frontal nudity during a bathing scene involving Betty Pei Ti, have lead some to claim erroneously that Celestial - the company who has remastered and released the film onto DVD - censored the print. This is not the case. The moments were never officially part of the film as it played in theaters, though those of you in desperate need of seeing Bruce Lee's favorite female co-star kissing another woman can still get an eyeful thanks to the DVD's stills gallery. Neither scene is vital to the movie of course, nor has any real bearing on the action that isn't communicated through other scenes. It's just, well, you know us and our fondness for nudity.

That's not the only place the film plays with gender, however. In a series of twists that foreshadow the gender-bending antics of Hong Kong new wave films like Ching Siu-tung's Swordsman II and Swordsman III: The East is Red, as well as Ronnie Yu's Bride With White Hair, we get not only the cult of sword-swinging lesbians but also a character who is able to change genders at will and wreak all sorts of havoc as a result. And while it's not exactly part of the gender bending subtext, the shots of a paralyzed Ti Lung sitting in a flowery white swing above a misty perfumed pond look like something right out of your better gay nightclub floor shows. Not that toying with gender was anything new. Kungfu films have always enjoyed doing things like taking beauties such as Cheng Pei-pei and Shang Kuan Lung Feng and dressing them up as men. Unconvincing men, but men never the less. And Hong Kong entertainment in general has a fondness for men in drag that remained unsurpassed until the advent of the Spanish-language cable network Galavision.

All of Yuen's work in these adaptations of Kung Lu novels, and indeed much of the director's work in general, is infused with a more feminine quality than the films of other directors in the genre, even other directors like Liu Chia-liang who appreciated female heroines. Part of this comes from intricate delicacy of Yuen's set-pieces. They are, as stated previously, absolutely gorgeous. Part of it comes from the fact that his female characters are allowed to be strong and feminine where most female kungfu stars were simply women acting the same as the men. There's nothign wrong with that, of course, but the fact that Yuen protrays his women as women, with their own unique character traits, makes for deeper, more interesting figures.

It's perhaps ironic, then, that Chor Yuen is also known for upping the anty when it came to exposing female flesh. Not that nudity was anything new to the kungfu film, and in fact in comparison to many films fromt he same era, Chor Yuen's films are relatively tame in the amount of nudity they show. They only seem saucier because the director handles it in a very adept way. It's not the amount of flesh that is revealed, but the way Chor Yuen reveals it. There is nothing vulgar or obvious about his handling of the saucier bits. They're quite poetic, and because of that, quite erotic. It's that classy handling of the material that makes it seem much naughtier than it really is. It's because he makes what little nudity there is really count, instead of just giving us a parade of gratuitous boob shots during rape scenes. It's, well, hot. As such, even his coy use of female nudity seems artistic and feminine in its touch. And that's the touch that probably explains why, despite his fondness of nubile young nudes, Chor Yuen has garnered so many female film admirers who are turned off by all the chest-beating maleness of Chang Cheh. Chor Yuen's heroines can be naked without ever seeming debased, and his heroes can read poetry and give each other flowers without seeming wimpy. Like everything else surrounding the director's work, it's really quite refreshing and very unique.

As an action film, Clans of Intrigue doesn't disappoint, though it is heavier on discussion than some people might want. Chor Yuen's work is the missing link between the classic wu xia films of the 1960s like Come Drink With Me and Temple of the Red Lotus, and the wildly over-the-top new wave swordsman films of the 1980s such as the Swordsman trilogy and Zu. Although the relative obscurity of Chor Yuen's body of work has caused it to be overlooked when drawing the map of Hong Kong film trends, its availability on DVD will hopefully allow the director to take his rightful place as one of the most innovative and influential directors in action film history. Without his work, it's likely the much-talked-about flying swordsman films of the 1980s and 1990s wouldn't have come to pass, or at the very least, would have looked remarkably different. Directors like Ching Siu-tung and Tsui Hark owe a tremendous debt to Chor Yuen. That said, Clans of Intrigue is not the kungfu blow-out as delivered by guys like Chang Cheh. While it certainly doesn't skimp on the sword fighting and jumping over high castle walls, it's not the center of attention. That position belongs to the esoteric plot.

But when the action does heat up, it's frequently fast-paced and impressive. The final duel between our trip of heroes and the characters eventually unmasked as the villains of the piece is phenomenal. For starters, you've never seen so many double-crosses in such a short amount of time. Moreover, one of the characters, upon having their hand chopped off, angrily picks up said hand and flings it with such force that impales another character. You just can't get much tougher than that, unless you're the guy in Story of Rikki who uses his own intestines to strangle his opponent.

The Chor Yuen films have been the definite highlight of the recent Shaw Bros. DVD releases, and Clans of Intrigue is a sumptuous example of why. It is extravagantly filmed and directed, sporting eye-popping artistry and visual flare, lavish sets, mind-numbingly complex plotting, beautiful women, heroic men, and sword fights galore. While the team of Lung Ku, Chor Yuen and Ti Lung would top themselves the same year with the exquisite Magic Blade, Clans of Intrigue proved vastly popular - and rightly so. It's a tremendously impressive film, and it spawned a sequel called Legend of the Bat, reuniting Ti Lung and Ling Yun in another tale of intrigue and deception. If you are looking for a good introduction to one of the most astounding and unjustly unrecognized talents in Hong Kong film history, then Clans of Intrigue is indeed a grand place to begin.

Seven Grandmasters is a simple tale about a kungfu master who wants to retire knowing he is the best fighter in China. So he sets out on a journey with his daughter and some students to challenge the seven best fighters in the land. Along the way, they pick up a bumbling bumpkin who dreams of being a kungfu master (and of course, becomes one) so he can avenge his father's murder.

Not an earth-shattering plot, but what this film is about is wall-to-wall kungfu, all of it absolutely breath-taking. There are so many styles, the fights are so long and well choreographed -- it's basically a textbook on how to make a kungfu film. And it's all the more inspiring considering that it was made for fewer peanuts than you'd casually throw to a greedily grasping howler monkey in the zoo. With very few dollars, no major backing, and his usual cast of overlooked stars, Joseph Kuo has given us one of the seminal kungfu films.

If you haven't seen this one, you need to hustle your ass down to the video store and pick it up. It's every bit what a kungfu movie should be about: kungfu. Kuo never delivers frills, but he knows how important the core is, and that's what he concentrates his energies on.

Not to say that he doesn't know how to do anything but film fights and action scenes. His characters are interesting, and he gets in enough human emotion and comedy to carry the film during the non-kungfu scenes, not that there are many of those. Even though it's pretty obvious that the bumbling student will eventually be convinced that his master is, in fact, the same man who killed his father, it's a satisfying finale to see them face off and the truth emerge.Everytime I watch a Kuo film, I want to thank him for having made it, and this is probably his best, most pure film.

Two friends with very Chinese names (Joey and Gary) survive the slaughter of their family by greedy land barons. Gary, however, is captured, and Joey falls through a mystic portal, where he meets the King of Hell! He cuts a deal with the Prince o' Darkness, gaining supernatural powers and control of nine blood-guzzling demons in exchange for his eternal loyalty to the King of Hell.

He manages to save Gary after Gary's head is chopped off, and sets out to reclaim Gary's fortune for him, as well as deal out hellish justice to those who conspired against them. The nine demons he control remain dormant as a necklace of skulls until he summons them up, at which time they become eight giggling fanged children and one sexy woman. They then jump around, flip about, and suck the blood of Joey's enemies.

Gary reclaims his estate, but soon other greedy people are out to get him, and Joey has gotten a reputation as an evil spawn of hell, being that he is now an evil spawn of hell and all. It's interesting to hear people refer, in all seriousness, to "The demon Joey!"

Gary gets murdered a second time. Joey befriends a woman forced into prostitution and one of the murderers' righteous son to fight the second group of killers. Along the way, the woman and the righteous son (he also has a traditional Chinese name -- Roland) try to save Joey's soul from the devil. The finale sees Joey take on the traitors while they all skate around on a river! This absolutely must be seen to be believed. It's every bit as wild as the stilt fight in Ninja in the Dragon's Den, though not quite as exciting since there is a lot of wire work. But I mean, people are skating all over the damn place, flying, and doing kungfu while shooting magic rays.

All sorts of weird magic and voodoo abounds, as well as loads and loads of great kungfu. Chiang Sheng, long the babyface of all the Venoms, loves casting himself in the evil roles in these later films. This is one of those films that you really have to see to believe. All kinds of strangeness gets tossed at you. I absolutely loved it, although I'm still trying to figure out what the drawbacks are to being a minion of the King of Hell.

This movie is like one of those matches. You can't say a whole lot about the plot. The direction is good, but it's not inventive or earth-shattering. But the performance of the two combatants in the ring -- or in this case, on the screen -- is so astounding, so superb, that the movie is elevated to the ranks of near godhood by "workrate freaks" like me, people who appreciate the athletic skill and martial arts talent of the people involved.

Though he doesn't ever get the credit he deserves and seems to have been forced into the shadow of his two brothers, Liu Chia-yung proves in this film that he is a solid kungfu director and actor. Liu's brother, Liu (Chia-hui) plays a Shaolin monk (of course) who is battling it out with a Tibetan Lama (Lo Lieh) over some lost sacred treasure.

The simple plot lends itself to tons of exciting confrontations between the two respectful rivals, including a classic fight in which they must both remain completely silent while fighting, going through insanely amazing spots to avoid smashing furniture and decorations in a fancy, cluttered room. There is quite a bit of comedy thrown in to make the moments between fights enjoyable, and the whole thing is just simply one of the best kungfu movies around.

Of course, those "moments between the fights" don't come very often. If he does nothign else, Liu Chia-yung crams more kungfu into each of his films than any ten other films, yet he has the wisdom to temper it with good acting and plenty of wit and charm. Ninety minutes of nonstop kungfu sounds fun, but it would get pretty boring after a while. Liu makes his characters interesting enough to carry the film from one breath-taking action sequence to the next.

It helps that the man is working with two of the great legends of martial arts films. His little brother, Liu Chia-hui has a name synonymous with stellar kungfu films. Working as part of the team that included Liu Chia-yung and his other brother, Liu Chia-liang, Liu Chia-hui starred in many of the most respected, excited kungfu classics ever made. His foil and foe (in wrestling terms, it's a classic face versus face match here, two good guys going at it), is played by Lo Lieh, one of the true veterans of kungfu films. Lo cut his teeth in the Shaw Brothers swordsman films of the 1960s usually alongside Jimmy Wang Yu. They were two men who would later go on to be known as "being sorta ugly." Lo also starred in the classic pioneering kungfu film Five Fingers of Death.

It's a damn shame that, like many others, this film gets almost completely ignored by the new generation of fans. They are definitely missing out. If you like your kungfu fast and plentiful, pure and exciting, then this is the film for you. It gets our highest old school recommendation.

There are a few things, few key things, that embody the bad-ass cinema Teleport City likes to call it stomping ground. Maurizio Merli's mustache is one. Pam Grier pulling guns and knives out of her afro is another. Rudy Ray Moore's butt naked dive down the steep hillside while wearing only his floppy blue pimp hat. And of course, there's Tomas Milian and his little red bikini underwear.

But there is one man above all others, above even Maurizio Merli himself, who truly encompasses everything in this world that is bad-ass. One man whose every action, every look, every sound exudes cool toughness. One man, above all others, who has transcended all cultural barriers and become far more than a movie superstar; one man who has become a cultural icon, a piece of modern mythology.

That man is Bruce Lee.

You can't overstate the impact Bruce has had on modern pop culture. Stars have come and gone, names like Jackie Chan, Clint Eastwood, and Jet Li are all familiar marquee names, but Bruce exists above all of them. Take a walk down any street in New York and you will see half a dozen shops with some sort of Bruce Lee merchandise. T-shirts, posters, scrolls, black velvet paintings, statues, action figures, movies -- pretty much anything. I even saw one of those blacklight posters featuring the "holy trinity" of Bruce Lee, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Marley.

And these aren't just kungfu film specialty stores or Chinatown curiosity shops. Blacks, Puerto Ricans, whites, Dominicans, Chinese, Vietnamese, you name it and their culture has embraced The Dragon. No other action film star occupies the spot Bruce has obtained in our society. He is a modern day Greek hero, a Jason or Perseus, a man whose legend has grown to epic proportions.

So, the obvious question from many people is "Why Bruce Lee?" What was it about this brash, good-looking young guy that made him such a phenomenon? Why Lee and not Ti Lung? Why Lee and not anyone else in the world? The answer is equal parts timing, skill, charm, and mystery.

Bruce hit the scene at a time when a lot of people in both Hong Kong and the United States were desperate for an underdog hero, especially one who wasn't white. The world was gorged on James Bond rip-offs and sanitized Westerns full of chiseled white guy good looks. The Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, the Native American awareness movements that became things like the Wounded Knee siege -- all these cultural elements were combining in an explosive wave of disillusionment with the way things used to be. The urban communities in America, who were hit especially hard by both the Vietnam War (since so many soldiers were minorities) and the frustration faced by the Civil Rights movement. With real-life heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. being gunned down, people were looking for heroes somewhere. Up until then Hollywood hadn't been providing them with anything.

Then came Bruce Lee. It's no coincidence that Lee hit the scene around the same time that black action stars like Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree, and Pam Grier were starting to make a big impact on the scene. People were fed up with Bond and John Wayne. They wanted someone more modern, more bad-ass, and most importantly, they wanted someone to whom they could relate. Bruce wasn't white. He wasn't big. His characters were not rich or influential or successful. He was an everyman for all other men who could not see themselves in the previous set of American heroes. He was different, and he was the underdog.

In each of Lee's characters, there was plenty for the disillusioned to identify with. The condescension and racism hurled at him in Fist of Fury, having to take shit from a corrupt boss in Big Boss -- there were things people recognized, and things people loved seeing Lee overcome. His biggest film in the United States, Enter the Dragon was a wild James Bond type action-adventure film where the Asian was the hero rather than a silly sidekick or devious villain. It was also a movie where the black character (Jim Kelly) is a noble and heroic man of principle, while the white guy (John Saxon) is a sleaze. A lovable sleaze, but a sleaze never the less.

Bruce Lee gave people hope, goofy as that might sound, that they too could overcome the odds facing them in everyday life. They could rise above the poverty and hopelessness of their situation. When Lee died under mysterious circumstances, it cemented his place not just as a star, but as a legend. His mark on society, from his face on a t-shirt to the popularity of martial arts training as a way to cope with growing up in the inner city, will remain in place long after the names of hundreds of other stars have been forgotten.

So which of these films should be the first Bruce Lee film we review? His biggest, Enter the Dragon? How about his first, Big Boss? Or the one most everybody considers his best, Fist of Fury (aka Chinese Connection). I think we've explained the whole Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Chinese Connection thing, but just in case you forgot, here's the deal: when Bruce Lee's Hong Kong films were brought over to the US to capitalize on the success of Enter the Dragon, someone screwed up and got the titles confused. Big Boss, Lee's first film, was mislabeled Fist of Fury. Realizing the blunder too late to fix it, distributors took the actual Fist of Fury (Lee's second, and many say best) and retitled it Chinese Connection, probably to capitalize on the success of French Connection as well as Lee.

Since they were on a roll, they decided to also retitle Way of the Dragon, calling it Return of the Dragon and marketing it as a sequel to Enter the Dragon despite the fact that it was made before that film.

But that brings us to where we want to be, which is the movie we've chosen to be the first Bruce Lee film we review. We chose it because it seems to slip through the cracks a lot, and because it's the only complete film that was written, directed, and choreographed by Lee himself. It's an excellent movie that allows Lee to showcase not just his incredible martial arts skill, but also his ability as an actor. Most people like to write Lee off as a one-trick pony, perhaps the best martial artist to ever live but a pretty rigid actor. Those people obviously go along with hearsay rather than actually investigating the matter themselves. People who claim Lee could only act enraged and couldn't handle comedy should pay closer attention to this film, in which Lee gets to shine as a comedian as well as an all-around kungfu bad-ass. Bruce even gets to do stuff that results in that "wah wah waaaahhhh" comedy music!

We begin at an airport in beautiful Roma -- that's Rome to you non-cosmopolitan types out there. Bruce, playing Tang Long, is something of a country bumpkin from the rural land outside Hong Kong. Right away, Lee is great at invoking a sense of sympathy for his character. I mean, we all know Lee is the baddest man to ever walk the planet, but he plays his scenes here so realistically awkward and embarrassed that you feel bad yet amused for his fish-out-of-water character. He goes to an airport lounge and, not being able to read the menu, end sup ordering about six bowls of soup. Of course, he is still Bruce Lee, so he saves face by finishing them all, which allows him to launch a series of "must go to the toilet" jokes that will be a sure-fire comedy hit with the kids for years to come. Face it, you can be some Ivy League blue-blood in a long raccoon coat, carrying a pennant that says "Rah, Harvard!" or whatever, but you will think farts are funny. Go on. Admit it. You'll feel better.

I don't really know why farts are funny. I mean, we've been doing it for thousands upon thousands of years. You'd think we'd be over it by now. Sad as this sounds, I have spent many an hour late at night amusing myself by imagining a bunch of homo robustus types gathered around the campfire and bursting out into prehistoric prehysterics when one of them lets it rip. I think there were a lot of jokes in Caveman featuring Ringo Starr, so you know where I'm coming from with this one.

I know they are base and disgusting, low-brow joke material fit for a Chris Farley movie. But think about it. Fart humor transcends race and culture. Everyone the world over thinks farts are funny. Even high brow films like Scent of Green Papaya had fart jokes in it. Maybe it's because they are a great equalizer. Everyone has to do it sometime. Maybe it just feels good to do something that primal and animalistic. That's why we laugh, even at our own farts, and even harder when we see other animals do it. Nothing's funnier than a farting dog or howler monkey. When my parents' dog farts, it gets all freaked out, jumps up, and starts hunting furiously for the fart. I'm going to start doing the same thing, I think.

I know it's gross, but come on -- if Bruce Lee thinks farts are funny, then you can, too!

Lee also mines comedy gold in the "goofy effeminate guy with bad toupee" department. Bruce was, in fact, a huge fan of the Dean Martin - Jerry Lewis comedy team and the many films they did together. While Bruce's sense of humor is not quite as slapstick (and far less annoying) than Jerry Lewis, you can still see the influence it had on him. The main difference here is that Bruce is both the goofy, out-of-place Jerry Lewis and the suave, competent Dean Martin, depending on what the situation called for. Bruce definitely had a lot more depth than people gave him credit for.

After the soup skit, Bruce meets up with his cousin, played by the lovely Nora Mao (Fist of Fury, Big Boss), his frequent co-star. Nora had written her uncle back in Hong Kong to explain that they were having a lot of trouble with thugs at the restaurant in Rome. She expected him to send a lawyer, and instead he sent Tang Long, which Nora isn't exactly happy about as Tang is ignorant of big city culture, especially in the West. Tang Long explains that, while he may be a bit dim, he can help out in other ways.

He gets to show everyone his "other ways" when the thugs show up at the restaurant to smash things up and convince the Chinese to sell their land. It's always something like that, isn't it? The Man and The Mob are always trying to build malls on land owned by kungfu schools, community centers, and restaurants. It's a tried and true film formula, but it's also a comment on gentrification. In my old neighborhood, you could make a movie about The Gap trying to buy up land belonging to community gardens and outreach centers. Same shit, different era. I think The Gap stuck mostly to financial strong-arming, though, rather than sending thugs to beat up a guy named Pops.

Realizing that the thugs, one of whom I swear is Oliver Platt, won't listen to words, Bruce decides to speak with kungfu. He thrashes them soundly in a great sequence. Great not just because Lee is so fast and crisp with his art, but also because Lee's character undergoes a wonderful transformation. When dealing with the restaurant and the city of Rome, Tang Long is lost and vulnerable. But when he steps into the back alley to beat the shit out of the no-goodniks, he immediately becomes confident and in control. Ass kicking is a universal language, after all.

In between visits by the thugs, who keep arming themselves heavier and heavier only to still get the shit kicked out of them by Bruce, the film takes full advantage of its Rome locations. Hong Kong movies that filmed outside of Hong Kong were still very rare in the 1970s, so Lee takes in as much of Rome as can be crammed into a few "travelin' all around" montages. Then it's back to the alley behind the restaurant to kick ass on some more thugs. This is a pretty weak-ass mafia, I must say. But I guess they're not the big-time guys we see in films like The Godfather. After all, those guys are controlling international drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and resort casinos. These guys are trying to muscle out a restaurant. It's sort of like how most leprechauns get to guard gold and countless treasures, but Lucky the Leprechaun has to guard a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal.

In a theme that is present in all of Lee's Hong Kong films, he teaches other Chinese -- other minorities -- not to be ashamed of themselves or their heritage. When he arrives in Rome, the staff at the restaurant is practicing Japanese karate because they feel Chinese martial arts are weak and embarrassing. Once they see Lee in action, however, it fills them with pride and reinvigorates their interest in their own culture. This was an important theme for a film in 1972, and it's a large part of why Bruce Lee became so popular. He fights for the right not to be ashamed of the color of your skin, and he shows that minorities can survive the pressures put on them by the established white majority. They can rise above racism by learning, relying upon, and believing in themselves.

Once the boss finally catches on that his thugs are a bunch of fat-ass losers, he hires some karateka bad-asses in the form of Bob Wall and Ing Sik-wang (Stoner, When Tae Kwan Do Strikes, Young Master). Wall is best known for his role as the right evil O'Hara in Enter the Dragon.

After a while, Bruce gets sick of beating up the thugs, who just never seem to learn their lesson. So he goes to their headquarters, beats them up there, then does a very impressive kick in which he leaps up into the air and smashes an overhead lamp, completely without the use of tricks or wires. To accomplish the same simple but impressive kick these days would require Yeun Wo-ping to use ten miles of wires, pulleys, and CGI effects.

Pissed off about their light, the thugs hire their own kungfu bad-ass in the form of Chuck Norris. I know, I know. You guys here Chuck's name and it makes you grimace and roll your eyes. Great. Now we gotta watch Lone Wolf McQuade. But take heart, li'l buckaroos. There is a vast difference between Chuck Norris the Bruce Lee opponent and Chuck Norris the Texas Ranger. For one, bash him all you want, but Chuck Norris was an amazing martial artist at his peak (which is when this movie was made, and why Bruce chose Norris). Legit martial artists and kungfu fighters all recognized Norris as possessing one of the fastest, deadliest spinning back kicks in the world. Judging Chuck's abilities based on his American films is like, well, judging Cynthia Rothrock by her American films or Sammo Hung by his work on Martial Law.

The finale sees Lee face off against Norris in the maze-like arches of the Roman Coliseum, invoking the not-so-subtle image of modern-day gladiators. The ensuing battle is one of the best kungfu one-on-ones ever filmed, with the Benny Urquidez - Jackie Chan fight in Wheels On Meals being a distant second. Part of why the fight between Norris and Lee is so great is because it hurts. In 1972, kungfu film choreography was still pretty basic outside of Lee's films, and a lot of the over-choreographed fights, while looking spectacular, lacked any sense of injury or power, especially when the guys would hit each other over and over with no real sign of damage.

When Lee and Norris hit each other, you can feel it. Their blows carry weight, and the weight shows. It's obviously a result of two legitimate martial arts bad-asses being involved rather than two guys trained in Peking Opera, dance, or stage fighting. Of course, despite all the flesh-pounding-flesh action, the most painful scene comes when Lee uses Norris' thick, Piltdown Man-esque coating of body hair (it's possible he was one of the cavemen laughing at farts I talked about earlier) as a weapon, ripping out a big chunk of chest hair (he could have used a little off the back as well). Of course, ripping out a man's chest hair makes you bad, but then proceeding to blow it into the man's face makes you bad-ass. It's the little things, you see.

There's some end-of-the film shenanigans after the fight before Lee wraps everything up and heads back to Hong Kong. The film is absolutely superb. Lee shines as both an actor and a fighter, and his skill and charm should be more than enough to win over pretty much anyone. Watching this movie, you'll have little question left in your mind why Lee has become to celebrated by so many different types of people. One could even take the Civil rights slogan "We Shall Overcome," and apply it to the work of Bruce Lee.

Bruce's direction is good. Nothing overly inventive or unique, but more than competent for a first-time director. It's a bit raw at times, though he really shines at filming the fight scenes, which probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Sammo Hung, in many ways a student and master of Bruce Lee's, would be the one director more than any of the others who would realize Lee's ambitions in filming and directing kungfu films. What Lee began in Way of the Dragon and never finished in Game of Death, Sammo would carry to fruition in films like Knockabouts, Prodigal Son, and Project A. Makes you wonder what the "Three Brothers" of Sammo, Yuen Biao, and Jackie Chan would have been like if it had been four brothers, and one of them was Bruce Lee.

Way of the Dragon, aside from being some of Lee's finest stuff, is notable for launching the film career of Chick Norris as well. I don't actually know if this is a good thing, but I guess it was good for Chuck. He went on after this film to play a bigger role in another Hong Kong actioner, Slaughter in San Francisco, aka Yellow-Faced Tiger. That movie gave him ample opportunity to throw back his head and laugh in an evil fashion while he stood with arms akimbo. He also got to kick people. From there, it was the big-time, as he went on to play heroes in one crappy film after another, thus endearing him to the American public. If you have to watch any Chuck Norris film besides Way of the Dragon, make sure it's The Octagon, because that at least has some ninjas in it.

Chuck Norris and Bob Wall would reunite many years later to make the film Hero and the Terror, and even later to appear as themselves in Sidekicks, a film best left undiscussed.

Bruce, of course, went on to make Enter the Dragon, the film that would become his ladder to the realm of modern-day legend and launch the kungfu craze in America. Lee's contributions to the genre are sundry. He gave it it's banner star. He gave it the refinement of fight choreography, which up until Lee had been stiff and stage-like. He gave it comedy and heart. He gave it international appeal.

He gave it Bruce Lee. A man full of anxieties, flaws, genius, ambition, fear, and fearlessness. A man whose name and face would become ubiquitous.

So if you want to see Lee's biggest film, see Enter the Dragon. If you want to see his first film, see The Big Boss. If you want to see his best film, see Fist of Fury. But if you want to see the one film out of all of them that shows Bruce Lee at his finest in all ways, the one film that has the most Bruce Lee in its heart, the one film that, more than any of the others and despite its rough edges, defines where Bruce wanted to take the genre, then you have to see Way of the Dragon.

Set during World War II, Liu's character is given a secret map by a dying rebel fighting the occupying forces from Japan. The monk is pestered by a couple petty criminals who think he is carrying a treasure map instead of a strategic one, and to make things even more of a pain as he tries to reach the rebel headquarters to deliver the map, the Japanese have all sorts of gun-toting toadies running after him.

It's a variation on a theme, of course. There are plenty of movies in which Shaolin Monks help rebels fight the Ch'ing soldiers of the final dynasty, but it's rare that you see Shaolin monks fighting during World War II. I would guess it's mainly because World War II isn't very funny, especially for China. If you need evidence of the fact that World War II wasn't funny, just watch Hogan's Heroes.

To be honest, there really isn't a whole lot to this film. It's simple and straight-forward, with very few diversions along the way, which is more than can be said for Liu Chia-hui's trek in the film. However, don't let the simplicity fool you. Sometimes, kungfu works best in it's most simple form, free of frills and posturing. Warrior from Shaolin is plenty good, though it's not the best work by director Liu Chia-yung or his adopted little brother, Liu Chia-hui. Considering the filmography of each man, however, even on a bad day they do good work. And Warrior from Shaolin has plenty of good stuff going on in it, not least of which is Liu Chia-hui's goofy straw hair and floppy brown hat disguise. But he has to wear it so no one will think he's a monk. Instead they will think he's just some deranged hillbilly.

Great martial arts and acting highlight this fine kungfu fare. Liu Chia-hui may look silly in his floppy brown hat and straw hair, but that doesn't stop him from kicking some serious evil boo-tay. As usual, Liu Chia-yung himself shows up to give everyone who acts heroic a hard time.

This one recently got an el cheapo re-release here in the states and part of one on ten million "Shaolin Collections" to come out in the past year. It's worth picking up, though the old Ocean Shores tape looks much better if you can find it.

REVIEW:
Where most films about Shaolin characters are more about Shaolin than people, Liu has put a lot of work into characters. Still, I personally find the movie a bit dull, and the final fight ends ridiculously, with Hung's son punching the hermit, then a freeze-frame, and a narrator going, "And eventually, he was victorious."

The number one source for the anger fuelling the film was the untimely death of the Shaw Studio's brightest star, Alexander Fu Sheng. Barely into his 20s, Fu Sheng had become the James Dean of the Hong Kong action scene, known for his love of fast cars, high rolling, and romancing women, one of whom was a budding pop star who grew up in Canada named Sally Yeh. Fu Sheng often played a hot-head with a heart of gold, and he carried that role beyond the screen.

There was no doubt that under the wing of phenomenal director Liu Chia-liang, Fu Sheng's star was back on the rise after a devastating accident left him with two broken legs. He stood to be as popular as Jackie Chan, who had really hit the big time in the 1980s and achieved a level of success hitherto unobtained by Shaw Brothers stars, most of whom had disappeared, defected to other studios, or were working with Liu. Alexander fu Sheng was, in many ways, the studio's best hope to prosper in the changing times.

It all came crashing to a halt, however, when Alexander's penchant for fast driving finally caught up with him. He died in a car wreck -- living like James Dean, dying like James Dean. His passing, which occurred during the filming of Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, cast a dark shadow over the studio, which was dying a slow death of its own as Raymond Chow's Golden Harvest studio became the reigning king of Hong Kong cinema. With Alexander's death, the Shaw Brothers Studio watched any hope it had to compete with the new school disappear.

Fu Sheng was well-liked, and his death put everyone in a bad mood. It is this mood that colors the landscape of the film, which is relentless and oppressive. It opens on a battlefield, where the noble Yang family is ambushed and slaughtered. Before the credits are over, nearly everyone is slain. Only two Yang brothers survive -- Liu Chia-hui and Alexander Fu Sheng. Fu Sheng has gone insane after witnessing the murder of his brothers and father. Chia-hui is on the run.

Alexander returns home to his mother and sisters to deliver the bad news. Meanwhile, Liu Chia-hui seeks refuge at a Buddhist temple. He, too, is quite mad, driven by an uncontrollable rage and bloodlust. His demeanor doesn't exactly mesh well with the pacifist nature of the monks, but they take pity on him and humor his desire to become a monk.

The abbot of the temple visits the family to let them know their son is still alive, and his sister, played by the always wonderful Hui Ying-hung, sets out to bring him home. At the temple, Chia-hui practices pole fighting with a ferocity that upsets the monks, who explain to him that they learn to fight only to defend themselves from marauding wolves. Even then, they find only to defang the wolves, not kill them.

Of course, a toothless wolf would die a far more agonizing, drawn out death than one simply killed outright, but the movie doesn't bother with that.

When the men who ambushed the Yang family gang up and capture the valiant Hui Ying-hung, Liu Chia-hui leaves the temple to rescue her. The ensuing battle amid a pyramid of coffins is astounding. It has some wire work, but it's used fairly subtlely and not to achieve superhuman feats. The kungfu is fast and brutal, and just as the two Yangs seem beaten, Chia-hui's brothers from the temple show up to "defang the wolves." What follows is a chilling sequence in which the monks rip out whole sets of villain teeth.

The entire film runs at near breakneck speed, with the anger building and building until the stunning and cathartic finale. In the end, Liu Chia-hui is left wandering between two worlds, too violent to be a monk, yet too alienated to return to the troubled world. It's very much like the situation facing the studio and its stars. An uncertain future, unable to exist via the old ways, unable to fully grasp the new ways.

It's an explosion of emotion -- anger, frustration, madness, disappointment, confusion, and maybe a little hope. The humor Liu Chia-liang so often used is non-existent. The compassion is lost in the madness of the situation as the characters are swept up in the uncontrollable firestorm of rage. It is bleak, depressing, and ultimately open-ended. Liu Chia-hui's only revelation is that he is a beast unfit for life as a man or monk.

It's also one of the most effective, moving, and exciting kungfu films ever made. Everyone was on top of their game for this one, putting an extra effort into it to ensure that Alexander Fu Sheng's final film would be memorable. Indeed it is, even though his role in it is minimal because of his death. Eight diagram Pole Fighter is effective in every way -- as a parable about the fragile state of man, about the fragile state of the studio that produced it. Films would come and go, the Shaw Brothers studio would fade, but Eight Diagram Pole Fighter remains at the very top of my list.

But while we're stuck enduring the likes of Valentine and Urban Legend: Final Cut, Japan has been quietly - and sometimes not so quietly - taking over the helm as the premiere home for horror. Whether it's by just doing the age-old traditions correctly or by creating something brand new, Japan has become a haven for people who want more from their horror films than carbon copy scripts, a hot new soundtrack of industrial/hip-hop/metal, and twenty-year-old clones all formed from strands of James Van Der Beek's and Jennifer Love Hewitt's DNA.

Among the many aspects of horror of which the Japanese have become the caretakers is the zombie film. As we've lamented elsewhere, no one save the occasional deranged fan seems all that interested in making zombie movies anymore. There is something apparently unmarketable about the entire concept, even though all horror films these days seem to have a soundtrack containing at least one track by Rob Zombie. His last name and popularity has not, unfortunately, translated into similar success for the zombie film. On one hand, I suppose I should be thankful that I don't have to see my most beloved of horror subgenres done up as a film starring Denise Richards and any number of indistinguishable male leads from popular shows on the WB. On the other hand, it'd be nice if a few underground film makers remembered the genre, or at least some grumpy Italians.

But if Japan has become the sole guardian of the zombie film, then at least they are in very good hands. With films like Junk, Wild Zero, and most recently Versus, Japan has been not just keeping the zombie film alive (or at least undead), it's been reinventing the whole concept without disrespecting the traditions we've come to know and love. The Japanese approach, influenced by everything from Resident Evil video games to Evil Dead, and of course George Romero's "Dead" trilogy, has been to approach the zombie subgenre as much as an action film as a horror film. While still maintaining the Romero style look and behavior of most zombies, they've also thrown in kungfu-powered super-zombies and Guitar Wolf flinging glowing guitar picks into the skulls of undead legions. The movies have proven that, while Japanese filmmakers know their material, they also know that they have to put a new twist on it to keep it fresh.

Versus, a zombie masterpiece directed by first-timer Ryuhei Kitamura, will invariably be compared to Wild Zero, also made by a first time film director, Tetsuro Takeuchi. Both are completely over the top in ways no one else ever dreamed of going over the top. Both are possessed of a hyperactive insanity and relentless pace. Both are full of zombies, and both ooze with cool. But where Wild Zero draws its charm and energy from likeable characters, sweet romances, and rock and roll cool, Versus relies entirely on high style and complete bad-assness, making it an altogether different kind of movie in that sense, though no less successful and certainly no less enjoyable.

The movie opens in feudal Japan with a battered samurai facing off against a gang of shambling, sword-wielding zombies. Immediately establishing a kinetic, Hong Kong style approach to the action, the samurai butchers his way through the undead only to come face to face with their apparent master, a wicked human priest. The samurai charges valiantly only to find himself sliced in two. If that's not a good way to start a film off, I don't know what is.

Skip ahead a couple hundred years to the present. Two convicts are running through the woods after being sprung from prison. They soon meet up with their benefactors -- a gang of stylish young yakuza so utterly and completely cool that they punctuate most of their actions with frequent "cool yakuza" poses. Sometimes, movies are cool. Sometimes, movies try so hard to be cool that they look ludicrous. And sometimes, movies push their ludicrous cool so far over the edge that they become cool again. Mere words can't express just how bad-ass everything in this film ends up being.

One of the cons is happy to see the young yakuza, who look like spoofs of the various characters from the Hong Kong Young and Dangerous films. The other con, prisoner KSC2-303, is more suspicious of their motivations. After all, he doesn't even know them. Why would they bust him out of prison? When he discovers that they also have a kidnapped girl in their car, he promptly breaks out in some amazingly cool kung-fury, resulting in him ending up with a gun, the girl, and a yakuza hostage. The choreography for the fights is pure Hong Kong madness. Anyone who has followed Japanese cinema knows that they have traditionally been fairly lackluster in their action choreography, never having become masters of it quite the way the folks in Hong Kong were. Well, all that's changing, and Versus is a perfect example of where it's being taken. Ultra-fast, acrobatic, brutal, and simply stunning to behold.

As is wont to happen when people are pointing guns at one another out in the woods, two people end up dead: one yakuza and the other convict. Unfortunately for everyone else, they don't stay dead. Mere minutes after finding themselves with brand new bullets in their brains, they're back up and ready to do more damage to whoever is most convenient. Everyone is fairly startled, but no startled that they can't continue to pump the recently reanimated zombies full of lead while KSC2-303 and the girl make their escape into the forest. One yakuza, their resident kungfu bad-ass, pursues while the others mill about, make plans, and try to figure out what the hell just happened. No one has any names in this, so we'll just refer to them as the leader (ultracool guy in ugly lime shirt), the weasel (little guy who whimpers and panics a lot), and the smart guy. He may not actually be smart, but he has long hair and wears spectacles and a sweater.

The first plan is to simply haul ass out of any forest where corpses suddenly spring back to life. The leader puts a damper on that plan by insisting that they must wait for the big leader, the guy who told them to free KSC2-303 and kidnap the girl in the first place. As the yakuza stand around hoping nothing more will happen, the weasel has the realization that they have just wandered into the forest meadow where they like to bury all their murder victims. Before you can say "uh-oh," dozens of zombie yakuza are bursting forth from their shallow graves. Like your traditional zombies, they are slow, decayed, and tend to moan and stagger a lot. Unlike your traditional zombies, these guys haven't forgotten how to use their guns! Why they would be buried with fully loaded weapons, and why those weapons would still work after being buried in the dirt for months, possibly even years, is a stupid question to ask in the context of this film. I mean, they're zombies! Rising from the grave with fully loaded, fully operational pistols should be the least of your reality concerns.

The yakuza take to an ultra-gory battle with the zombies while KSC2-303 and the kungfu yakuza bash one another senseless not too far away. Their fight leads them back to the meadow, and everyone stops fighting each other long enough to fight the zombies. Then, of course, it's back to fighting each other.

Elsewhere, two completely insane cops are hot on the trail of the escaped convicts. One of the cops, Officer, apparently lost his hand during the escape. The other, Fighter, is simply crazy as a shithouse bat and keeps ranting about his invincible kungfu while all the while seeming very much like Jeffery Combs at his most gloriously manic. Must be the hair. The cops aren't above indiscriminately murdering innocent bystanders, either, if it gets them a new car.

As the madness continues, the leader yakuza finally finds the second group of yakuza, this one mostly ultra-sexy females predisposed to the same habit of striking super-slick poses for no particular reason other than looking incredibly cool. With them is the main leader, who we quickly recognize as the same guy playing the wizard from the beginning of the film. When he learns that KSC2-303 and the girl are both at large somewhere in the woods, he decides his first course of action will be to slaughter every single yakuza he brought with him, thus turning them into a legion of super-powered undead gangsters. Only one woman, an ultra bad-ass kungfu fighter, escapes his murderous frenzy.

It is through him that we learn the woods are known in ancient legend as the Resurrection Forest for obvious reasons already illustrated. We also learn that he is indeed the self-same wizard from the opening of the film, a long-lived demon who has waited five-hundred years for his ancient samurai rival and his ancient princess to reincarnate at overlapping times. He needs the blood from both of them to open a portal to hell that will grant him some unspeakable power. KSC2-303, of course, is the reincarnation of the samurai hero, while the girl is the princess. They have no intention of going down without one of the goriest, most insane fights you'll ever see on film. Meanwhile, those nutty cops and the female kungfu bad-ass are still running wild as well.

And that, my friends, is it. The plot is simple despite a few supernatural embellishments. The entire film is basically one very well-done, highly stylized action sequence after another, with a heavy peppering of spoofing throughout. KSC2-303 is the ultimate bad-ass anti-hero. In one of the film's best moments, he offs a gangster zombie, bends down, picks up a pair of sunglasses, then slides them on as bad-ass music plays. The girl then gives him a "what the hell are you doing?" look, and he promptly takes the glasses off. The film is full of clever touches like that, managing to provide ultra-slick action while lampooning it as well. Versus delights in poking fun at the stylish absurdities of every action film that was written as a rip-off of John Woo, but does so with such gusto and reckless abandon that it also manages to outdo them all in sheer style and suaveness.

There was hardly any budget for this film, and what little there was went primarily to the special effects, which range from very good to mind-blowing (sometimes literally). A mixture of old-fashioned squibs, fake blood, and make-up effects combine with expertly done fight choreography and wire effects to cook up an endless parade of exploding heads and guts, buckets upon buckets of blood, and even homages to gore classics like the hole in the head from The Beyond and the shotgun hole through the gut from Cannibal Apocalypse.

To free up as much money for effects as they could, the entire film is shot using relative unknowns and a single inexpensive location: the forest. The technical mastery and slickness of the film prevent it from looking cheap, however, and while it may be confined to a single primary location, it's a big location that provides for a fair amount of variation in scenery. Occasional flashbacks to the back story involving the wizard, the princess, and the samurai further allow the director to make the most of his one location so that by the end, you hardly even notice. Not that I would care much, anyway. Many of my favorite horror films -- Evil Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead -- restrict themselves to no more than a few locations. Some truly gorgeous cinematography further allows the director to make the most the situation and avoid ending up with a movie that looks cheap.

The acting really shines. No one has a name, as I said, which in itself is a wonderful spoof of horror films where characters are often completely forgettable and only have names as a matter of formality. The weakest link is the girl who plays the reincarnation of the princess, but she's still quite capable. Tak Sakaguchi as KSC2-303 plays a subtle, grim-faced cool that we haven't seen the likes of since Clint Eastwood hung up his six-shooter and started making movies for fans of the Lifetime network. The director claims he found Tak Sakaguchi on the streets in the middle of a real-life fist-fight with rival youth gangsters and realized he'd be perfect for the part! Wielding samurai swords, shotguns, and even a massive artillery cannon, he is so completely bad-ass that he's off the scale. The evil wizard exudes quiet cool as well. The cop Fighter is absolutely hilarious. Everyone else is there to get turned into zombies.

Musically, the movies sounds like a video game. Lots of techno and instrumental drum-n-bass stuff, or whatever. I guess there are lots of different subgenres for that stuff, but I don't know any of them. While I wouldn't rush out and buy the soundtrack, it works amazingly well within the context of the movie, sort of like all the techno that was in Run Lola Run. It lends an even more surreal feel to the film, removing it that much further from any reality with which you or I might be familiar.

Versus is a perfect example of "reinventing the legend." Too often, that term is used incorrectly by people who aren't reinventing anything. They are completely throwing out the old and making up their own nonsense. Versus, on the other hand, showcases a great knowledge of the zombie and action film lore that came before it and constantly tweaks it and pumps it full of adrenaline without ever showing disrespect. And it's nice to finally see a zombie film that doesn't involve people rushing to the nearest building and boarding themselves in.

Clocking in at very near a full two hours with very little plot, many have said the film could use some editing, which it may well get when it finally sees full release. I don't agree with those who feel the movie needs trimming. Maybe I'm just more patient, but there wasn't a single time when I felt bored or wanted to move things along. The movie maintains a breakneck pace from start to finish, and at least in my opinion, it does not falter. There is a lot more crammed into the story and the action than is evident perhaps on the first viewing. A simple plot should not be mistaken for no plot or for a bad a plot. And the visual jokes are so plentiful that you have to keep going back again and again, not that I mind doing that. Versus is among the very few films I watched, then immediately watched again.

As if all this complete and utter insanity wasn't enough, Versus also manages to be the first film in I can't remember how long that has a shock ending that is actually shocking as opposed to idiotic, that actually serves as a wonderfully appropriate and unexpected punctuation mark rather than seeming like some lame-brained after-thought tacked on to open the door for a potential sequel. The shock ending, of course, is a time-honored, or at least heavily abused, tradition of the horror film. Almost none of them make it work. Halloween pulled it off, but those since then have been few and far between. The Ring, though I don't know if I consider the end of that film to be a "shock" ending so much as it is just a creepy one.

Most shock endings have no basis in reality at all, and are simply slapped on without complete disregard for logic and total contempt for the intelligence of the audience. Friday the 13th films provide us the most numerous examples (gee, is Jason gonna jump out of the lake for no reason again?), but my favorite recent example was Tim Burton's disastrous Planet of the Apes, which posses a shocking twist ending so mind-numbingly stupid that it'll almost make you look favorably on censorship so long as it is applied to Planet of the Apes. When asked about it, Tim Burton obviously had no explanation, which makes sense, as there is no explanation for it. It was a moronic ending. Being the director though, he couldn't say, "Yeah, it was stupid." So instead he got all pissy and complained that not everything could be explained, that some things are there to "make you think." Of course, what it does is make you think the director and the scriptwriters were complete dolts. But I digress.

Versus comes up with the most ingenious way to spoof the shocking twist ending cliché: by making it work. As if the movie hadn't already given us so much, it ends things on an amazing note with one of the best twist endings in the last twenty years. It's really the cherry on top of the whipped cream on top of the melted fudge on top of the delicious clown sundae.

I can't say I like Versus quite as much as Wild Zero. I prefer Wild Zero's developed and lovable characters and rock-n-roll lessons. Junk, another Japanese yakuza versus zombies film, was fun on its own terms, but it's really been outclassed by Wild Zero and Versus. But as I said, Versus is a very different type of movie despite being possessed of the same wild energy and anarchic spirit. It's really not fair to compare it to anything else, because frankly, nothing else compares, and no other movie quite like it has ever been made. Or rather, lots of movies like it have been made, but never crammed all together into one movie with this much total insanity running rampant. Fans of action and zombies will be delighted. Fans of low-budget filmmaking will marvel at how much this film delivers with so little money with which to work.

And fans of spirited, no-holds-barred fun films will be overjoyed beyond the capacity for words.

At the same time, or rather slightly before, in 1981, a wild bunch of Australians released a little film called Road Warrior, a sequel to a rather good, intense "society on the edge" film called Mad Max. Both the original and its sequel (let's all pretend there was never a third movie made, and the world will be a happier place) starred a handsome up-and-comer named Mel Gibson, and I feel safe in saying I expect big things from him at some point in his career. In much the same was as Conan, Road Warrior become a phenomenon and sparked an entire genre of post-apocalyptic movies features guys in shoulderpads driving around in the desert and shooting each other with crossbows.

Of course, most of these films lacked a few key elements that made Road Warrior such a hit. For one, Road Warrior was exciting and action-packed. Most of the imitators were not. For another thing, Road Warrior had good writing, good acting, good music, and a wild cast of characters. Max, our hero, was the classic spaghetti western antihero. And then you have the hooting feral kid with the razor blade boomerang, the goofy guy in the gyrocopter, the stunning female warrior with the Kim Novak eyebrow action going on, the little weasely guy who gets his fingers cut off, Vernon Wells with a pink mohawk and assless leather pants, that guy who went on to be in Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, and of course, a bodybuilder in an iron Quiet Riot mask who carries his own set of loudspeakers around and calls himself The Humongous.

And need I even mention that this is the movie that gave us the phrase, "Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-a!" Even if the movie hadn't been good, that alone justifies its existence.

The legion of imitators, on the other hand, tended to lack these key components and were, instead, ninety or so minutes of sullen guys trying to pass bad acting off as end-of-the-world angst. You got cheap sets, lame stunts -- especially compared to the spectacular stunts in both Mad Max and Road Warrior -- and bland as dry white toast characters. And worst of all, in order to mimic Road Warrior as best they could, almost all of them are set in the desert, barring the offshoot genre where some muscular guy is in the Bronx (which shifted the rip-off material from Road Warrior to Escape from New York). It made sense for Road Warrior to be in the desert. After all, Australia has a lot of desert, and in the context of the film, we can assume that only a few people even bothered to brave the outback. It wasn't like the entire country moved into the desert. But if the film is set in America, why would everyone live in the desert? We have nice countryside, and last I checked, one of the many affects of a nuclear war was not changing everything into the Sahara Desert.

More than likely, they were just aping Road Warrior and also discovered it's a lot easier and cheaper to have your post-apocalypse in a desert than in a city. Sort of like one of those sci-fi films set a hundred years in the future but all the action takes place in "an amusement park designed to look exactly like a small American town in 1985."

Still, as stupid and cheap as many of these knock-offs were, which again seemed to come primarily from Italy, a lot of them were also tremendous amounts of fun. Their shoestring budgets and slapdash structure often resulted in some entertaining stuff, though not always entertaining in the way the makers might have intended. New Barbarians, despite everything that is wrong with it, is one of these entertaining films.

I've noticed that you can trace b-movie trends through the years simply by looking at an Italian director's filmography. Enzo Castellari started his career in spaghetti westerns, then in the 1970s moved on to low-budget black action films (with a couple really blatant Jaws rip-offs thrown in for good measure), and then into the exploding post-apocalypse film, where he actually made many of the genres more amusing and entertaining entries, including 1990: Bronx Warriors, Desert Warrior, Escape from the Bronx, and the movie we're here to discuss, New Barbarians.

Giancarlo Prete stars as Scorpio, since all post-apocalypse type guys have to have cool names like that. You don't ever hear about a guy named Mike saving a tribe from marauders. Prete worked with director Castellari on several films, and even managed to score a part in cult fave Ladyhawke. Scorpio is your typical wasteland wanderer. He has a suped-up car, though to be honest, most of the suping-up seems to consist of randomly attaching fins and little sticky-out bits of chrome to your car. However, we can tell Scorpio is a cut above some mullet working on his Camero in the front yard, because Scorpio had the good sense to install a keen green-tinted plastic observation bubble in his car. This, of course, serves no purpose whatsoever. In one of those boss custom vans with the Yaz artwork airbrushed on the side, you can use an observation bubble because the back of the van can get dark, and sometimes when your laying back there, sparking one up with your baby as you listen to Toto, you want to be able to stare up at the stars and talk about your dreams. Sure, we've all been there, right?

But this is a car. There are windows all round you. Why do you need an observation bubble? Well, I guess because it looks cool and he can turn the light on and get the slick green glowing effect. Who am I to question Scorpio? It's not like I've survived the end of the world or anything, though I did survive seeing Cats.

At this point, I need to get a little something off my chest. Like many of you, I was a child of the 1970s, and I cling to that notion and that decade as my heritage, primarily because I really hate that 1980s synth rock crap. Gary Numan my ass. Having been squeezed out in 1972, I feel I have enough conscious years during the 1970s under my belt to claim it as my fatherland. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying disco was good, because we all know disco was a fart straight from the sour bowels of Satan himself, and I'm not a big fan of feathered hair. But the 1970s gave us many wonderful things as I've discussed multiple times in other reviews and need not retread here.

With that established, I have to confess that as much as I may make fun of them, I sometimes really wish I had been one of those 1970s van guys. You know, I could drive my Chevy custom with a wizard brushed on the side out into the desert to just think and look at the stars. I could cruise around town listening to Skynard and James Taylor and Golden Earring, who I once saw play live at the Louisville Riverfront Festival along with Foghat. I could put the moves on my baby in the back, which would of course be done up with some boss, red shag carpet. I could wear tight jeans and smoke pot with friends while saying, "Dude, they are so right. We really are just dust in the wind." I could take my baby by the hand in the back of my Chevy van after making clumsy but sweet love to her, and give her the whole "Freebird" speech about how I'm a wandering spirit who can't be held down to any one place. She would understand, because she's cool that way, and one day she would stand on the edge of town, a lonely tear rolling down her cheek, as I kissed her good-bye, climbed into my van, and rambled on to the next town. "See ya around, Keith Allison," she'd say to herself as I disappeared into the setting sun.

Yes, the van guy -- philosopher morons. A dying breed in today's world of high tech computers, electronic music, and these Limp Bizkit fans with their piercing and their loud rudeness. In this modern age, there seems scarce little room for a lazy, introspective dreamer downing a Coors in the back of his van and really empathizing with the melancholy lyrics of "Beth." And I sit here, surrounded by mountains of steel and concrete, awash in a sea of technology that accomplishes nothing, drowning in a deluge of boundless information and no wisdom. I sit here, and I pine for the simpler days that passed me by. I sit here and I shed a solitary tear for the last of a dying breed, the van guy. To you I raise my glass and say, "carry on, my wayward son."

Scorpio is a van guy, or he would have been a van guy if the world hadn't ended. You can see it in his eyes. As things stand, however, he spends most of his time driving around aimlessly in the desert, making one wonder where he gets his gas (I get mine at the taco stand -- thank you and good night! You're a wonderful crowd! I'm here all week).

There's this bunch of goofball survivors who have a caravan of crappy "future" cars going through the desert. Then there are these guys called the Templars who, just like the actual Templars did when they started getting insane and corrupt, go around hassling people. The movie opens with the caravan under siege, and mere minutes into the film we get brutal yet incredibly fake looking decapitations and mass slaughter. That's a good way to open any film, and I wish more films opened with gory mayhem, especially films that deal with Meg Ryan and her struggle to find a meaningful relationship in this crazy modern world of ours (hint for Meg: look for a van guy). Now if You've Got Mail or Hanging Up started off with a scene of nomads being slaughtered, then maybe I'd be interested.

The Templars kill people in a variety of ways. Sure, there's the simple killing and stabbing and shooting, but why do just that when you can mount a razor blade fan on your running board and drive around chopping people in half with it? Sure, being able to use some of your weapons requires an amazingly coincidental set-up, but you know how people are. If you are trying to run them over with your razor blade fan dune buggy, they will oblige you by running slowly directly to the left of your car and will even stumble when you need them to so you get that good cleaver to the head effect.

So we can deduce that the Templars are not the nicest of fellows, but to be honest, how would you feel if you had to wear all white padded outfits with oversized shoulderpads? Scorpio has a couple run-ins with these guys, more by accident than as a result of him trying to help anyone out. We get the less-than-shocking realization that, at one time, Scorpio was a Templar himself, but turned his back on their cruel ways so he could drive around in the desert causing them grief. Along the way he picks up a sexy lady and Fred Williamson. Of course, if you have Fred Williamson, a sexy lady can't be far behind.

Fred, who had also worked with the director before on GI Bro (oh brother), plays Nadir, and obviously he's a total bad-ass in a casual way. When I think of all the action stars who I would not want to cross, Fred Williamson tops the list. The man is simply the paramount of outdated cool and tough. How can you not love a guy who, in the late 1990s answers the question "Have you ever thought of marketing and selling your trademark cigars?" with the reply (paraphrased from memory) "Hell no! What would I do if I saw some punk walking down the street smoking one of my cigars and looking like some sort of faggot?"

Williamson represents one of the film's key cool aspects. Usually, when a white hero has a black sidekick, the black guy is comic relief or, despite being better than the white guy, ends up captured and having to be rescued. Look at The Matrix. Does anyone honestly believe Lawrence Fishbourne needs Keaneu Reeves' help in a fight? I didn't think so. In New Barbarians however, Williamson kicks ass from start to finish and never once makes a mistake. He's the one who has to bail the white guy out, not the other way around. He's the one who doesn't need help, even though he's smart enough to take it when it's offered. And he shoots dynamite bow and arrows like Bo and Luke Duke! All hail Fred Williamson!

I can't remember a damn thing about the woman except Scorpio beds her at some point and she probably does get captured. She's not a very interesting part of the story.

Scorpio is also friends with a wily little juvenile mechanic played by Giovanni Frezza, known to cult film fans the world over as "Little Bob" from Lucio Fulci's House by the Cemetery. At least this time around he hasn't been dubbed with the most annoying voice ever in the whole universe, so you can actually get to like him. He is the ace repairman who customizes Scorpio's car. Like Nadir, he's far more competent than Scorpio at pretty much everything you can think of. I started wondering why Scorpio was even the hero of the movie, since he's easily the least memorable of all the guys.

Eventually, Scorpio bungles his way into getting captured by the Templars, and the main Templar gets to give the whole, "Join us, and together we could rule the land!" speech, though you have to wonder why they are so intent on ruling a patch of very dead and worthless desert. When Scorpio refuses they tie him up and shock the whole audience by raping him. Yep, you heard right. Most sleazy action films, especially ones set after the fall of civilization, feature at least one woman getting raped, but how many have the bravado to leave the women alone and simply rape the male lead? Not too many, as I can recall, and while it's not "good," it was certainly unexpected and daring.

Back in college, I took a course on literature and war. In it, we read a short story in which the narrator was a member of a tribe of gorillas who descend into madness and warfare. Quite a good story, really, and an interesting study of how animals behave when faced with impossible odds. One of the many things the dominant male gorillas did as the violence progressed was to begin mounting lesser males. The same thing happens in prisons, of course. More times than not, it is not a sexual act, let alone a homosexual act. It's simply a desperate display of power. It's a way to showcase your dominance over weaker members of the tribe. I'm not saying that New Barbarians is by any stretch of the imagination dipping its toes into the pool of analyzing the human psyche and what happens to it when its plunged into an environment of progressively more violent decay. More than likely, they just thought it would be shocking and unusual to victimize the male hero for a change. But if I was backed into a corner and was unable to escape the question by flashing my eye spots, at least I have ammunition for the argument, though quite frankly, I can't imagine any instance where I'd be backed into a corner and forced to debate the social and psychological implications of Scorpio getting sodomized by a Templar.

Anyway, this gets Scorpio fired up for taking out the Templars once and for all. After escaping their evil clutches when they all take off to do a little massacring, Scorpio commissions Little Bob (okay, so that's not his name in this movie, but still...) to make him a see-thru bulbous plastic suit of armor. This is easily the most disturbing thing ever. Imagine, if you can, if you dare, a vaguely out of shape David Hasslehoff (more out shape than Hasslehoff himself) squeezing his hairy, oiled-up beefiness into a clear plastic container, then running around wearing nothing but a pair of bikini briefs underneath as he blows things up. That's pretty damn frightening, and I'm sorry for even planting the image in your head.

Scorpio gets help from Nadir and Little Bob, who actually do just about all the work and killing. Nadir has the explosive-tipped arrows, but rather than firing them, he just takes off the arrowheads and throws them at people. It seems a bit of overkill to use an entire stick of dynamite's worth of explosives for individual guys, but the end result is lots of exploding people, or rather, lot's of exploding mannequins. We're not talking high tech here.

While Little Bob and Nadir single-handedly take out the entire Templar army and save the caravan people, Scorpio lumbers about awkwardly in his little plastic outfit until the head Templar finally stumbles across him for the final showdown. Does Scorpio end the reign of terror, kill the Templar leader, then wander back off into the wasteland? Well, what do you think?

There are a lot of adjectives one could apply to this film, but the most appropriate seems to be "absurd." Scorpio is obviously a loser. Everyone in the whole world is more competent than he is. But hey, all he wants to do is drive his car, baby! For a post-apocalyptic world, things sure are easy to obtain. Williamson has an expensive patent leather outfit that looks shiny and new. No one seems to have any trouble finding endless amounts of ammunition for their exploding arrows and bullets, and no one is hurting for gasoline. And these are cool explosives people have. Sometimes they will blow up entire compounds, while other times they will just blow up a barrel. The head Templar's gun seems particularly versatile with the level of explosive action it can generate.

And I have to pull Road Warrior into the fray one more time. Max: dusty, torn-up leather outfit. Scorpio: trousers, a fuzzy Sonny Bono sheepskin vest, and then that frightful naked bubbleman outfit. And you wonder why not as many people remember Scorpio.

Of course it's the absolute absurdity of this film that keeps it entertaining, though the awkward but frequent violence and action certainly help out. I mean, the film makers really tried to have a lot of cool brutality and car stunts; it's just that they failed miserably every single chance they got, and that in itself is worth enjoying to no end. The acting is on par with what you'll see on display at your local community theater, and the Templars in particular are positively Renaissance Faire-esque in their talent. Fred Williamson is, as you would suspect, Fred Williamson. Who would tell him to do anything differently? And why would they want to in the first place? You cast Fred Williamson because you want Fred Williamson. When you want a bad-ass who never shows weakness and never makes a mistake, you cast Fred. When you want a spastic nerd, you cast Eddie Deezen. If you put them in the same movie, that's money in the bank. Unfortunately, Eddie Deezen is not in this film.

New Barbarians is bad. It's really bad. It's also amazingly entertaining and full of energy. Despite the cheapness on display and the ludicrous scenario, there's no denying that the film delivers plenty of action and violence, and the whole thing is tremendously fun. If you are looking to explore the polluted waters of post-apocalypse films, then the work of Enzo G. Castellari are the perfect place to start, and this is one of his wildest, most enjoyable films.

The primary cause for the shock and outrage directed toward the movie from us Yanks is simple enough: violence. To sum it up in a nutshell, this is a movie about recent middle school graduates who are rounded up and transported to a remote island where they are forced to hunt one another down for the amusement of adults. The film pulls no punches in depicting the brutality of adults toward children as well as from one child to another. This simply will not fly in the United States. The recent glut of tragic school shootings has left America somewhat shell-shocked and hesitant when it comes to dealing with the topic of teen violence.

We're happy to simply gloss over it -- perhaps the biggest tragedy of all to come from these horrible events. We blame the media, blame video games, blame extreme music. Basically, we blame everything except poor parenting, a complete lack of discipline practices, and a social set-up that encourages the alienation and persecution of any student who is different, smart, or in any way quirky and deviant from the rigid status quo. While we went on and on about violence video games and movies, we completely failed to address the obvious roots of the problem because it required us to point the finger squarely at ourselves. That's something we've never been very good at doing.

I would not sit here and try to tell anyone that violent entertainment does not trigger violent behavior in certain people. It's obvious that it does, just as The Holy Bible has triggered extreme violence in masses of people throughout the centuries. The question we should be asking is not why we have these violent movies or video games. The question is simply why are people today so monumentally stupid that they can't grasp something as basic as the difference between real and make-believe?

I grew up watching screwy movies, stuff far more twisted and violent than these kids ever saw. Horror, kungfu, crime, by the age of twelve I'd seen more shockingly violent fare than most people do their entire lives. I watched pro wrestling, listened to heavy metal and angry punk rock. And you know what? Not once did I ever entertain the thought of walking into a classroom and offing the kids who fucked with me in school -- and believe me, as a punk rocker growing up in a rural Kentucky town during the mid 1980s, I got fucked with plenty. Not once did I ever think it was okay to piledrive my younger sister or try to fly by jumping out of a tree. Not once did I ever think anything I sw in a movie wa anything other than just what it was: an image in a movie. Not real life. Not how you are supposed to behave.

I'm not particularly smart, but I'm also not a complete idiot. Even a simpleton should be able to comprehend the simple concept of what you see in a movie not being an example of what you do in real life. So what is it then, what is it we're doing differently, that is causing kids and adults both to behave like brainless twits who cannot conceive of the fact that you should not drop a flying elbow off the couch onto a two year old child?

A big part of the problem is what I think of as new-age parenting. We live in a society that is so terrified of punishing a kid for being a rotten, spoiled asshole than we've ended up with a whole population of rotten, spiled assholes. Parents who attempt to discipline their children are chastised and live in constant fear of some bleeding heart guidance counselor from school turning them in for child abuse. Likewise, teachers are shackled, forced to operate with bound hands and attempt to instruct children who have basically been allowed to run wild and develop not the faintest sense of responsibility or consideration for others. To make matters worse, teachers who dare to flunk a student who deserves to be flunked are punished either for making the child feel bad about themselves or for making the school lose face by having failing students. As a result, we have a population that is now not only meaner and completely devoid of any sense of responsibility regarding their own actions, we also have a population that is just plain dumb as toast.

Unable to understand that their actions have consequences, and too stupid to realize that what they see in movies and video games is not real, we end up with students who lack any sort of coping skills, who freak out and can't think of anything to do other than respond with violence and screaming. And as adults, rather than analyze our failure as elders, we simply blame the movies, even though countless other people saw the same movie and didn't interpret it as an okay to gun down classmates or co-workers.

In this environment, it's no wonder people would be gun-shy about a film like Battle Royale. It requires an audience to understand the difference between reality and fantasy. It requires the audience to think about why the violence on screen is occuring, to analyze the actions of the people on screen, to think about why they have been driven to do what they are doing. It requires a basic understanding of satire and social commentary. None of these are things the average American youth has been taught how to do by either parents or school. Given our stunted emotional state in America, I have no doubt that a movie like Battle Royale would indeed result in violent behavior among some of the more astoundingly moronic kids who managed to see it. Given this admission, although I'm not a fan of censorship, I'm ultimately happy that the film may not see the light of day in the United States. The fewer idiots who have it as an excuse for their own misanthropic hatred, the better off the rets of us will be. besides, it's not like it's been banned -- it simply hasn't found a domestic distributors. Even with that limitation, it's not as if the movie is difficult to find.

Anyway, it's impossible to discuss the film without discussing, at least in some cursory manner, the plague of youth violence. I'm not equipped for a full-on debate over the topic, but it had to be mentioned. It's also worth mentioning the difference between school violence in America and school violence in Japan. Although not nearly as violent as America, nor as well armed, Japan still has its fair share of youth trouble, and they are the impetus for much of the action in this graphic but well-made film.

While American schools seem set up to reward mediocrity and encourage the dim-witted to beat down and prey upon the smart and unusual, Japanese schools are dog-eat-dog in the opposite direction. The pressure to get high marks, be an ace student, and get into a top college is intense, and much of the violence that occurs doe so as a result of this pressure. AT no point is this more absurdly obvious in Battle Royale than in a scene where a bloodied student, crazed by the situation in which he and his classmates have found themselves, charges toward his friends with guns blazing, screaming, "I will win this game and get into a good college!"

Things begin on a troubling note, with a frantic newscaster scrambling to get shots of the "winner" of some game, a smiling, blood-covered young girl. The movie continues innocently enough, as a senior class prepares for their final day of middle school. Everyone's thinking about their future, and the happiness is only slightly marred by the attempted stabbing of one of the senior teachers, played with biting wit by Takeshi Kitano.

While on a bus ride, the graduating class is gassed. When they wake up, they are in a dingy classroom on some remote island. Takeshi Kitano is present, along with a group of trigger-happy guards, to fill them in on what's happening. They have been chosen at random to compete in a game. The goal of the game is simple: kill all your classmates and avoid being killed yourself. The last one standing is the winner. If more than two students are left at the end of the game, everyone dies. If you refuse to play or attempt to escape, a lock around your neck will detonate and blow your jugular all to hell.

The students find this impossible to believe, but a switchblade to the head of a protesting young girl quickly convinces them that this is serious. A couple more students mowed down by machine gun fire, and one demonstration of the blood-spraying effectiveness of the exploding necklaces later, and everyone falls into line.

What struck me immediately about this film is that none of the deaths are lightweight. Even though the students who are killed straight away have had no more than a minute or so of screen time, their deaths affect the viewer. Part of it is the simple shock of what you're seeing. Outside of fetish porn, you don't expect to see a teacher fling a knife into a young girl's head. These aren't especially bad kids as far as we know; they're simply paying the price. The result is that each death, despite being sensationally gory, is also amazingly important and somewhat depressing. At the same time, each death is totally senseless. There is no reason, within the plot of the film, for the killing. No purpose is served, and that senselessness is the primary source of power, ironically enough.

The students are forced to watch a cheery orientation video in which the basic rules of the game are relayed to them by a perky spokeswoman. They're then released into the wild. Some immediately form coalitions, while others immediately become paranoid. A few simply go insane with fear. The killing starts the minute they get out the door, although a number of the students are more interested in finding a way to beat the game than they are in killing one another. There must be a way to disarm or remove the collars. There must be a way to survive the game without playing it.

But it's hard to think rationally when other students are lunging at you with a variety of weapons. Each student is given a weapon at random. Some turn out to be crossbows, stun guns, rifles, or machetes. Others are pot lids, binoculars, and similar completely useless items. As the bodies pile up and students form bonds and establish plans and strongholds, the adults provide play-by-play body counts and updates. Once again, the movie succeeds in making not a single death gratuitous. Each one is slightly heart-wrenching, and as the action progresses, you get sucked into rooting louder and louder for them to find a solution to this deadly puzzle. At no point did any of the violence and killing strike me as cool or slick. It's bloody, and it's upsetting, just as it should be.

That's the true triumph of the movie, and the big element that your average dolt would miss. The violence in the movie is certainly not glorious, and the call for an end to violence, for people to learn to cope with life without resorting to bloodshed, rings clear in every frame of the film. Of course, no matter how loud the message may be, plenty of people simply aren't interested in listening and would instead rather just look at all the cool blood.

The action focuses primarily on a young couple, Noriko and Nanahara, and a guy named Kawada who vows to help them get off the island and stay alive. It's no easy task, of course, what with the the students who have embraced the violence all too quickly and the constant threat of betrayal. When Nanahara is separated from the group and wind sup recovering from wounds in a lighthouse occupied by a force of girls, he's witness to all hell breaking lose when suspicion gets the better of them.

Meanwhile, another group of students set up a headquarters, complete with a generator and laptop computer one of them had in his backpack. Their hope is to get help from outside or find a way to disarm the necklaces. One of them, the son of a 1960s activist, figures the best way to really play the game is by taking the fight directly to the adults who are controlling things.

The movie keeps you off-balance by proving to you that anyone could die at any moment, even the people who seem like they're set up to make it. Additionally, it messes with expectations by doing things like staging an encounter in the woods between Norika and Nanahara and Takeshi Kitano during which he treats them with warm-hearted kindness. It's obvious at that point that there's even more to the game than we first suspected, and that it may be more than a simple case of adults being fed up with their self-centered offspring.

Meanwhile, the guy with the computer successfully link sup with a hacker group and downloads a virus into the control room's computers. Before they can take advantage of the collapse of defenses however, they are set upon by one of the few students. In the end, it comes down to only three, the same three who have been working together since the beginning: Nanahara, Noriko, and Kawada. With time running out before the collars self-detonate, the tension mounts. Will they stick together, find a last-ditch solution, die together, or turn on each other?

Despite the sensationalism surrounding the film, there's no denying it's power. It's a stunner, that's for sure, and not just because you'll sit there amazed at just how far the movie is willing to go in order to get its point across. While he may not be the director, it's obvious that the peculiar humanist twist Takeshi Kitano brings to his films was brought here as well. Amid the non-stop carnage and mayhem, there is an overwhelming sense of sadness and hope. The final stinger -- I don't know if you can call it a joke -- punctuates the proceedings in the most classic of Kitano ways.

There is no one in the world as adept at using violence to create such striking anti-violence messages as Takeshi Kitano. As far as I'm concerned, he's the most gifted film maker working today. And as I said, even though he's not sitting in the director's chair here, his influence is certainly prevalent. A film about school kids forced to hunt one another down is ripe for the tendency toward exploitation, but while it certainly isn't afraid to get its hand's dirty, it never sinks to the level of lesser films. It never undermines its own message, something that marred films like Men Behind The Sun, who undercut their own power by revelling and wallowing in the depravity they depicted. That movie, while effective, also felt too exploitive, too interested in depicting grotesque deaths while not interested enough in creating any sense of character.

Battle Royale does wonders in establishing personalities for the characters in a very short amount of time, and that adds strength to the story. While undeniably gory, the death in the film takes a back seat to the struggle, and there is no point in the film that the violence ever seems fun, sensible, or in any way appealing. A lesser film, once again, would have simply relished each murder while forgetting that each death needs a meaning, needs to pack a punch that will further turn off the viewer to violence and make them hope, against all odds, that the kids who rely on peaceful cooperation will pull off the seemingly impossible.

That said, it's a movie that would be totally misunderstood by the vast majority of American film goers (I'm not well acquainted with the movie goers of other countries, so I can't comment on them), adult and juvenile. Dismissed as poorly wrought melodramatic exploitation, tasteless insanity, or a really cool movie about kids killing each other, I really don't see a lot of people appreciating the effectiveness of the film. Chalk it up to culture gap, a lack of desire to see movies as anything beyond what exists on the very surface, what have you. Ultimately, it's not my job to give you your opinion, and we all have our own reasons for liking and not liking a particular movie.

Personally, I find the melodrama touching in much the same way it was pulled off in John Woo films like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Bullet in the Head. All three are frightfully melodramatic, but it's composed so well that you can't help but be sucked into it if you give it half a chance. But just like John Woo films, a lot of people will simply not be interested by the melodrama (or realize the fact that we are, as a species, way more melodramatic than even the most overblown of movies) or will walk away from it snickering. So be it. I have no vested interested in getting people to like a movie.

Unlike a John Woo film, however, the violence on display here is never poetic or beautiful. It's just gory and mean and depressing. It's a movie that makes you hate violence, that makes you want to just see the insanity end. Or at least, that's what it did to me. Admittedly, I went into the movie already abhorring guns and real-life violence, so I didn't take much convincing. It's not that I'm a pacifist -- I'll freely agree with the notion that there's are times when physical and violent confrontation are the corners we've painted ourselves into. It's simply that I think we've devolved to the point where violence is our first and only solution for even the most petty events. People killing each other because they got angry at a bad umpire call during a tee-ball game? This is not the behavior of a rational species. Violence should always, in my opinion, be the final resort, not the initial response. See? I grew up watching violent films, even watched Battle Royale, and I have yet to want to go out and murder people.

Director Kinji Fukasaku spent most of his career making some of the better yakuza films, with some sci-fi and ninja fare thrown in for good measure. At somewhere right around seventy years old, he's a rather shocking figure to have made such a shocking film. But then, Takeshi Kitano ain't no teenager, either. Together, the two of them, along with writer Kenta Fukasaku have done an admirable job in adapting the best-selling but highly controversial original novel by Koushun Takami into film. While some changes had to made (obviously the book is able to get into the heads of the characters in much greater detail) or simply were made (the movie is set merely in the near future, while the book is set in an alternate timeline when Japan did not lose World War Two and never had to repent for its brutal imperialist advances), they still manage to catch the essence of what is a very complex subject wrapped in what appears at first to be a very simple film. The screenplay is actually as much a better-armed reworking of Golding's Lord of the Flies as it is an adaptation of the Battle Royale novel, with a little MOst Dangerous Game thrown in for good measure.

It makes me wonder how people react to a book like Lord of the Flies these days, which is one of the original and most powerful explorations of children turning savage on one another. I've always felt that Lord of the Flies and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness are two of the absolute best novels for teaching young people to analyze and understand literature. Both books have a ton of messages in them, and very few of them are that hard for the average student, or even a sharp middle schooler, to grasp. But then, I don't even know if they teach literary criticism in schools anymore. From what I've seen, they barely even teach the kids how to read, let alone understand what it is the words are attempting to say to them. I think Battle Royale is bloodier but no less savage or intense than Lord of the Flies, but because it's using guns instead of pointy sticks, and because it's a movie instead of a book, it's going to get a lot more attention. I'm willing to bet if you relayed to the sensation-hungry mass media the story of Lord of the Flies without telling them what it was you were actually telling them, they would vomit out all sorts of indignant reports about this vile and violent story corrupting our children and forcing them to kill one another and break each other's glasses, how this twisted sick tale has children of no older than eleven or twelve marching around spewing vulgarities like "Sucks to your ass-mar."

There are plenty of other reasons to go bonkers over this movie. The acting is fine. Granted, the young cast mostly has to scream, cry, and die, but each one is believable and no one falls flat. They seem like actual school kids. Takeshi Kitano is, of course, gold. He plays pretty much the same deadpan but emotionally deep character he's known for in his own films, and he brings a twisted sense of very black humor to the violent proceedings. Scenes of him and a guard fighting over cookies in the control room as they continuously update the body count are a treat.

Aside from the acting and message, the film boasts a ton of action, all of it bloody and well-paced. An action film with a message would still be a crummy movie if it was boring and poorly executed, but Battle Royale injects the events with a sense of tense hyper-activity. There is no moment in the film when anyone is safe, when anyone can rest and relax. There is no point, even during the melodramatics, when you can let down your guard and take a breath, because there's always a very good chance that someone with a machete is about to pop up over the hill. While the action is not "well choreographed" in the same sense that action in Hong Kong is staged (after all, these are just kids, not hitmen well-trained in various gymnastic maneuvers to make their action flashier), it is brutal, bloody, and pulled off with a tremendous amount of energy.

But no movie is perfect. Battle Royale possesses a few problems that, while easy to ignore in my opinion, are still worth mentioning. For one, it's not clear exactly why the battle is allowed to take place. There is mention of an act passed by the Diet (Japanese congress), but it seems that such an act would not be passed even in extreme times without lots of controversy and constant protest, especially since it seems the battle itself actually does very little to curb teen violence. Since the kids are chosen at random, good ones get lumped in with the bad, and so there is no sense of it being a punishment or type of retribution for aggressive behavior. Why, after all, would you not be rotten if being good had just as much chance of landing you in the game? The news report at the beginning serves to further confuse the matter a little,as it would make it seem like the battle was a nationally televised event, yet once there, none of the kids seem to know what it is.

Another weakness of the script is that at times it becomes unclear exactly what it wants from the future. Obviously, a country that is willing to sacrifice its young in the name of stability, is roundly criticized (shades of the intense pressure put on young people to succeed in business and academics). Likewise, a world where children are simply allowed to run rampant with no discipline and no sense of responsibility is equally dangerous. It seems, ultimately, that movie simply calls for a little bit of common sense and understanding. In a way,it may seem like a slightly anti-climatic wish, but it's certainly sane. What we see in the film is what we seem unwilling to see in society: that we're destroying ourselves.

I know every generation thinks theirs is the worst, that they are the ones living in the end times and witnessing the fall of the empire, so on and so forth. I'm not naive enough to be that self-centered in the face of so much suffering throughout the history of humanity. But as far as things today go, you gotta admit, regardless of how hard those who lived through the Dark Ages had it, we could use a lot of improving. It seems amazingly simple. I mean, if we all just stopped being such assholes all the time, that would go a long way, but people seem to cling to their hatred of their fellow man (especially while driving) with dogged tenacity. And as long as we're insulating ourselves from and denying the causes of so many of our woes, as long as we're unwilling at every turn to accept any of the blame for the state of things, there's not much hope that the world is going to improve.

So perhaps the final message of Battle Royale is this: as adults, we've shouldered the younger generation with a hideous burden. We've completely failed to prepare them for life. We've completely failed to teach them responsibility, respect for others, or respect for themselves. We've failed to steer them away from self-indulgence and self-destruction. We've shouldered them with our guilt, our incompetence we remain unwilling to accept. We've decided the world is too much trouble for us, and we've left it to them to solve all the problems, while at the same time leaving them emotionally and mentally stunted.

And then we blame them. We blame them for being assholes when all they're doing is what they've been taught. We blame them for being out of control when we never made any attempt to teach them restraint. We blame them for our own bitterness, hatred, and buried sense of failure. We've stopped having children as a way of "feeling immortal" or simply because we want to love them, and we've started having children so we can have scapegoats and victims readily available.

In the end, a movie is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out. You take out of Battle Royale what you bring into it, and no one can be forced to find meaning in something that has no meaning to them. To be honest, I didn't expect to find the movie as powerful as I did. I expected to react to it no differently than I did to other noble but flawed attempts at using violence to criticize violence. Instead of drawing from the Cannibal Holocaust well, however, the film has much more in common with the work of Sam Peckinpah or even A Clockwork Orange, though I would not put it on the same level as that film. It took me off-guard, and maybe that augmented my reaction somewhat. It was certainly a pleasing revelation. Maybe I'm simply hungry for a movie that addresses what I feel is one of the fundamental great denials destabilizing our society; the self-same problem which probably makes it best that this movie isn't going to be gobbled up by teens across America.

The slower Jackie Chan gets in his old age, the more he surrounds himself with gorgeous women. Hell, Gorgeous was a rotten film, but it starred former nudie pin-up superstar Hsu Chi, who has been making a name for herself with her clothes on as a decent action actress in recent years. Jackie's latest, The Accidental Spy, pairs him up with another former nude model and video naughty star, Vivian Hsu. The point I'm really trying to make is this:

Damn, it's good to be Jackie Chan.

I mean, can you blame the guy? He's given everything for his art, everything to his fans. He's broken down, beat up, and will be lucky if he can remember his own name or walk in another ten years. Chan has sacrificed himself, his now former family, and just about everything else. You can play armchair psychologist if you'd like, analyzing how the fact that he was abandoned by his parents (who sold him to a Peking Opera school, where he met Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Yuen Wah, and Yuen Kwai, among others) has driven this insatiable need on his part to be loved and accepted by fans while crippling him when it comes to close personal relationships (his marriage was a total sham and his flings with sexy female starlets have become constant fodder for worthless Hong Kong gossip rags). He's somewhat cocky and egotistical (though honestly, wouldn't you be the same way if you were him), but he's also very nervous and humble around certain reporters and throngs of fans. Jackie's a complex guy, one full of personal problems and accomplishments, failures and successes. In short, he's a human, and that's why I like him so much and defend him, especially now that's he's probably in his twilight years.

Jackie's list of injuries is both frightening and amusing, but it should never be forgotten that he got each and every one of them trying to make us happy. There are very few, if any, film stars who have given as much to their fans as Jackie has. For that, we should be forever grateful. Hell, if he decided tomorrow that from now on he was only doing Merchant Ivory movies about snotty people in riding coats or big frilly dresses sitting in the garden drinking tea saying "pray tell," we should still never forget how much he's given to us. The man is, without a doubt, one of a kind, and there will never be another like him.

So as far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see Jackie going in the direction he's heading. As a fan of his since his old kungfu films from the 1970s, I'm satisfied to see him taking it easy, slowing things down a bit, and not mercilessly abusing himself the way he did in the 1980s. Sure, I miss mind-blowing sequences like the shopping mall finale from Police Story, but that was a long time ago. In 1985, I could run five miles without losing my breath. I could play a hard-fought ninety minute soccer game without a break. Nowadays, I can run from the front of my apartment to the curb with maybe nothing more serious than a severe cramp in my calf muscle. Hell, if I can hardly get up the four flights of stairs to my home without having to set aside an hour for recuperation, then I shouldn't expect Jackie -- as he approaches fifty -- to still be falling head first off clock towers.

A lot of people have been up in arms about Jackie's films during the 1990s. I agree that some of them were pretty bad. City Hunter was awful, Rumble in the Bronx was just plain stupid (a multi ethnic neon dune buggy gang from the Bronx? Someone watched too much Warriors) Police Story III was dull as dishwater thanks to a shoddy direction job by Stanley Tong, who for some reason could never figure out the proper way to film Jackie. Gorgeous despite featuring the unspeakably sexy Hsu Chi (and for you ladies, the unspeakably sexy Tony Leung Chi-wai) and a couple good fight scenes, was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. It was far and away the worst Jackie Chan film ever, and that includes his role as the evil melting king in Killer Meteors. It was insipid, annoying, and the people in it were so monumentally grating and stupid that I literally wanted to reach into the television and throttle them. Not having strange videodrome powers, however, I did the next best thing and just stopped watching.

But other than that, I think Jackie's films have been amusing at the worst, and at their best (i.e. Drunken Master II) they've been astounding. People were pretty hard on films like First Strike, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Same with Mr. Nice Guy. Yeah, they had their weaknesses, but I still had a good time. So Jackie wasn't delivering the next Project A -- big deal. I thought Rush Hour was okay, and would have been a lot of fun if I didn't find Chris Tucker so overbearing. Shanghai Noon was tremendous fun. In this day and age where everyone tries to be edgy, it was great to simply sit back and enjoy an old fashion action-comedy where the stars actually seemed to have some chemistry together. Who Am I was also a great deal of fun for me, and it was pleasing to see Jackie return to the final fight scene climax after shying away from it for so long.

In short, cut the guy some slack. For all intents and purposes, he should be dead. If you're a fan of Jackie, then you shouldn't be pulling for him to kill himself trying to pull off some stunt. He did that. Hell, he actually did kill himself when he cracked his skull open during a botched seemingly simple stunt in Armor of God. It's time to adjust your perception of Jackie. He's not the machine he once was. If you keep that in mind and you still can't stand his more recent movies, well there you go. Nothing wrong with that. There's this stuff called taste, and everyone's is slightly different. If, however, you do adjust your thinking, you might find that his newer films are still worthwhile, even if they are not the classics he was making in the 1980s.

So in short, if Jackie wants to relax and pal around with ultra-sexy women half his age, that's his right. I, for one, thank him for that almost as much as I thank him for Drunken Master II and Dragons Forever. A man who parades Hsu Chi, Vivian Hsu, and Michelle Ferre across the screen is still doing us all a great service even if he can't deliver the kungfu and stunts like he used to.

I should point out that in this movie, Jackie Chan attempts to outdo is formerly frequently nude female co-star by featuring prolonged exposure of his own bare ass. Longtime fans of Jackie Chan films are, of course, already acquainted with his bare ass, which if I recall correctly made its film debut in Police Story. I think this might be its longest appearance yet, and also its first action scene. For some of you, extended scenes featuring Jackie Chan's bare bottom may be enough to scare you away. For others, it may get you even more fired up about seeing the film. For me, as a seasoned veteran of movies that feature Jackie Chan and movies that feature naked rumps, I simply nodded at Jackie's naked butt and said, "Hey man, long time no see."

I always look forward to a new Jackie Chan film regardless of bare ass content, unless it's Gorgeous. It's always something fun and exciting, which is cool since very few movies get me fired up these days. What makes me sad is that I really miss seeing them debut on the big screen. I'm not talking about dubbed, edited, and re-scored bastardizations from Dimension, the people who brought you gangsta rap in Police Story III and everything in Spy Kids (in answer to your unasked question, yes, someone is going to hell for that movie). We used to always time trips to New York City to coincide with Chinese New Year, which in turn meant the debut at the Music Palace of a new Jackie Chan film. Rumble in the Bronx didn't seem nearly as stupid sitting in the balcony of the theater alongside hundreds of cheering, shouting, rowdy Chan fans. Seeing the premiere of Drunken Master II was positively electric. The theater was a complete nuthouse. People went insane. It was far and away the most fun I've had attending a film that was not at a drive-in movie theater.

I moved to New York when the Music Palace was in its decline. The collapse of the Hong Kong film market hit the theater hard. No one wanted to go see Wong Jing's latest piece of shit, which would no doubt have a title like Naked Killer VIII: All Whore Bitch Slut Women Rape Rape Rape yet would still manage to feature very little nekkidness while, at the same time, being non-stop hateful, misogynistic, and god-awful boring. Annual Jackie Chan films became a thing of the past as American studios nabbed the rights to his films. The Music Palace countered this downturn in business by trotting out classic Hong Kong films, which again is something I was incredibly fond of. For a couple years, I could amuse myself on a Saturday afternoon with a six dollar double feature on the big screen of films like Zu, Dragons Forever, and Swordsman. The theater wasn't nearly as packed, but there was always a decent sized crew there. As I did for every movie I ever saw at that run-down, wonderful place, I sat in the front row of the balcony. No matter when I went, no matter what movie I went to see, I seemed to always sit in front of the eight-hundred year old guy who would chain smoke and erupt into nerve-shattering fits of phlegm-choked coughing.

The beauty of the Music Palace was also its ugliness. As long as you didn't bring a forty-ouncer of Colt 45 in with you, you could do pretty much anything you wanted. You want to bring in snacks? Hell, the Music Palace would let you walk across the street and bring back a whole roast pig if you weren't enticed by their concession stand selection of M&M's, gummies, and dried cuttle fish niblets (not all mixed together). If you wanted to stay all day and watch the same two movies over and over, they were cool so long as it wasn't overly crowded. Thus, it became a refuge for homeless guys who needed a couple hours out of the cold or old Chinese dudes with nothing better to do than sit back, smoke, and watch some kungfu.

The audiences were always fun as well. This was no hush-hush affair. People were loud and vociferous. They cheered, clapped, hooted, hollered, and if the movie stank, they booed and heckled the images on the screen with a smattering of barbs and jabs in English, Cantonese, Vietnamese, or Spanish. It was always a mixed ethnic crowd. The movies may have been from Hong Kong and the theater may have been in Chinatown, but the people who came did so simply because they loved the films. Everyone left with smiles on their faces, either because they'd enjoyed the film and the experience, or because they'd enjoyed ripping on the film or groping their date when the lights went down.

I admit that I'm lowbrow. It doesn't bug me. For me, movie theaters are at their finest when you're seeing a wild film with an equally wild audience. You want to annoy me? Put me in an arthouse theater full of wannabe film students who nod constantly in "comprehension" and feel the need to laugh quietly at strange points just to prove they get something you totally missed. No, I did my time in the arthouse world. I read the books, studied the techniques, learned the theories. I tried to fool myself into thinking I was part of that world, but in the end, when it came down to French existentialism or Foxy Brown, the choice was clear.

Likewise, I like my movie-going experience suitably rowdy. If I was seeing a serious film with lots of drama, then sure, the gab would be out of place and downright annoying. But hell, when I'm watching shit blow up or fly around in space or jump off a building and kick someone in the head, cheering, booing, eating, and back row sex are all essential parts of the overall experience.

Unfortunately, the Music Palace could only sustain itself so long on the memories and nostalgia. In 2000, it finally shut its doors for good while all around it new DVD stores sprung up. It was a great loss. New York has very few offbeat theaters full of that much character and energy left. Where we were once unique, now we're just another collection of AMC and Lowes' cineplexes. The old Chinatown movie theater on the corner of Bowery and Canal is now a big Buddhist hall, and the Music Palace sits a little ways down the block, vacant and still echoing with boisterous laughter and yelling.

New Jackie Chan movies are still fun, but man alive do I miss the experience of seeing them on the big screen with hundreds of other rabid fans on opening night. Going to Lai Ying Music on the Bowery and finding the movie on DVD is cool, but it can't hold a candle to the days when I could see it on the giant screen at the movie theater right next door.

So, in the most roundabout way ever, it all finally brings us to the movie at hand, Jackie Chan's big Hong Kong film for 2001 (probably not his biggest film of the year, since Rush Hour II will be opening later in the summer). Like I said, I enjoyed most of his recent films even if they were flawed, and I really enjoyed Who Am I, which this film is very similar to.

One thing's for certain: as much as Jackie exploits his ability to hire cute female co-stars, so too does he still flex his considerable muscle to score all sorts of exotic location work no other Hong Kong film maker could ever dream of getting. Accidental Spy bounces from Hong Kong to Turkey, giving the film a real international, James Bond type feel, which is fine by me. Most of his films since Armour of God have featured a fair amount of globe hopping, and while some people have complained about the "international spy" feel of the films, I dig it, what with me being a fan of old spy films and all.

The action begins in Turkey with a bunch of villagers and tourists getting mowed down by masked men wielding machine guns. Nothing like a little mass slaughter to get things going. Obviously, that'll all come into play later, but the film quickly jumps to Jackie, who for the first time since I can't remember when, does not play a guy named Jackie. This time, he's Buck Yuen, acclaimed salesman of all things gymnasium related. The bit with an over-zealous Jackie trying to sell a rich couple on fancy exercise equipment is pretty funny. He resorts to doing flips on the trampoline and bouncing around on the exercise ball (the one piece of equipment he has ever been able to actually sell). This being a Jackie Chan film, none of this has much to do with anything, and of course Jackie is still an ex-cop. Jackie's been a cop or an ex-cop in pretty much 98% of the films he's made in the last twenty years.

While on his lunch break in the mall, Jackie foils a bank robbery. Of course, where some people would just punch someone or trip someone up, Jackie's attempts to foil the robbery result in a giant crane smashing through a glass building while Jackie dangles from the arm. And you thought you were daring on your lunch break because you took an extra fifteen minutes. Jackie becomes a big celebrity as a result of costing ten times as much in damages as he probably saved by foiling the robbery, sort of like when the Powerpuff Girls destroyed an entire neighborhood and historic bridge to stop a man who stole a hundred dollars.

His fifteen minutes of fame bring him into contact with a disheveled private eye played by the always delightful Eric Tsang (is every private eye in the world named Manny). You might know him as Blockhead from the old Lucky Stars movies, or you might know him as the host of a long-running Hong Kong variety television show. Or maybe you know this silly little guy as what he actually turned out to be: one of the most influential and powerful men in the Hong Kong entertainment world. Go figure. Eric Tsang is a powerful producer and his fellow Lucky Star and goofball slapstick comedian actor friend John Shum is one of the most important pro-democracy activists in China. What a weird world. Together they are the equivalent of Bud Abbot and Larry Fine. I suppose you really can't judge a book by its cover. Any day now, someone will discover that in America Don Knotts has been calling the shots all along.

Tsang is seeking out male orphans born in 1958, which Jackie, err Buck, happens to be. I guess since he took the time not to call himself Jackie in this movie, I shouldn't call him Jackie in this review. I guess his reasoning for always naming himself Jackie makes perfect sense. When you look up at the screen, you don't see Buck Yuen or anyone else. You just see Jackie Chan, playing essentially the same everyman (albeit an everyman with incredible kungfu skills) Jackie Chan character he's always been.

Tsang has been hired by a dying Korean man who is seeking his long lost son, who ended up in an orphanage in Hong Kong. With the promise of an all expenses paid trip to Korea, Buck agrees to at least go meet the guy.

No sooner does Buck get to Korea than he is confronted by an American-Korean reporter named Carmen (Min Jeong Kim in what looks to be a debut). She is working on a story about the man who might be Buck's father, Mr. Park. Turns out he was once an infamous North Korean spy who defected to the South while in Turkey. Jackie seems mildly interested in all this, but since he doesn't even know if the guy is actually his father, he doesn't have much to say. Park meets with Buck and challenges him to a little game of hide and seek. He has something of great value hidden, and Buck needs to find it. Unfortunately, the guy won't say what, though it soon becomes apparent that others want it, whatever it might be. When Buck goes to visit Park one evening, he finds a load of hitmen in the room. Jackie deals with them through creative use of kungfu and those defibrillator things they use to shock people's hearts back into operation.

Something to note right away: one of the things people complained about most in regards to Who Am I (and I do not share their outlook) was that there wasn't enough action, or at least not enough kungfu action. Who Am I basically had three extended fight scenes, but Accidental Spy opts instead to deliver a lot of shorter but more frequent action sequences. It's a similar formula to Jackie's 1980s films, and I think it works brilliantly. It keeps the film from ever slowing down. It's also worth noting that for the first time in forever, some of the action scenes are not based around Jackie running away from people. Jackie's run away from more adversaries than I can remember. Some of his best fight scenes came as a result of trying to get the hell out of town. Accidental Spy finally strikes a balance between "I'm going to run away and hit you with random things" and "I'm going to just stand here and hit you with random things."

Buck Yuen ponders the small number of clues left by Park, and eventually discovers a coded series of numbers that wind up being the telephone number for a bank in Istanbul. Some of Buck's detective work comes to him pretty easily, and Jackie communicates hard thinking by furrowing his brow. The narrative explains it all away by pointing out that he's very intuitive about a lot of things. Okay, sure. Hell, I've let worse things slide. With the $10,000 left to him by Park, Buck hops the next plane to Turkey, which is not unlike hopping on the last train to Clarkesville, except that it takes you to Turkey, where if you are lucky you can catch a revival showing of The Man Who Saved the World.

In Turkey, Buck finds a safe deposit box stuffed full of cash, which makes him mighty happy, at least up until the point where the same guys who attacked him back at the hospital in Korea show up again. More fighting and flying in and out of car windows ensues as Buck fights protect his life and his new suitcase full of wealth. Turns out the assailants weren't all that interested in the money, though. When the cops arrive, they split, leaving the whole pile of cash untouched.

Jackie checks into a posh hotel that was once a famous hang-out for spies, and he soon meets Yong (Vivian Hsu), the associate of a Japanese gangster named Mr. Zen (Wu Hsing-kuo of Green Snake fame). Jackie, being a sucker for a purty girl, arranges a dinner date with her, then promptly gets attacked by those guys again in a Turkish bath in one of the film's funnier sequences. Jackie and his opponents slip and slide all over the place before Jackie escapes the building, losing his towel in the process. What follows is the copious amount of bare Jackie butt I alluded to earlier. The fight scene is pretty funny, not to mention more than a bit remarkable. If you thought it was clever how Mike Meyers strategically covered his privates in Austin Powers, you should see it done while the guy is back-flipping and kicking and jumping over tables. I'm guessing there were some pretty good bloopers from this scene, although they were left out of the end credit blooper reel we've come to know and love.

Jackie makes it to his meeting only to get attacked again by those guys demanding "the thing." They might get farther in life if they were a bit more specific. The thing? What do they want? The guy from the Fantastic Four? Mothra's egg? That disembodied hand from The Addams Family? The head with spider legs from John Carpenter's The Thing? I mean, history is not short on things. Maybe these guys would be better off if they clued everyone in on exactly what thing they were looking for. I'm guessing they saw Jackie's thing during that last action sequence, but apparently that wasn't good enough for them.

Buck and Yong are captured and taken to a seaside village where they beat Jackie up more and demand the thing. To be honest, at this point it's beginning to all sound a bit silly. Maybe there is a cooler vague word in Chinese, but since all of this dialogue is in English, they go with the thing, which just starts to sound funny, like one of those old jokes that takes twenty minutes to tell and then ends with a really stupid punchline like, "and then he was hit by a car."

While getting beat up, Jackie manages to at least figure out that the thing is a new strain of Anthrax, which would be slightly less fatal than a new album by Anthrax. Turns out Park was supposed to sell the virus to Mr. Zen but decided against unleashing such death upon the world. Now Zen wants it because, you know, he's evil, and these angry Turkish guys want it because it was tested in their village -- thus that opening scene of mayhem! See, it's all coming together. The beating of Jackie is interrupted when the same masked men from the beginning of the film show up and start killing everyone. Buck and Yong make their escape after managing to destroy the entire town. This is Jackie Chan, after all. Or rather, it's Buck Yuen.

While afloat in a little makeshift boat, Jackie notices track marks on Yong's arm. Mr. Zen keeps her under his control by addicting her to heroin. It's a really weird and tragic little subplot that seems out of place in a Jackie Chan film, to be honest. There's really no point to it. It's not like we needed more reasons to hate a guy who slaughters whole villages and wants to terrorize the world with biological weapons. That he addicted a perfectly nice young girl to heroin is just sort of icing on the cake. Jackie, of course, wants to help her because he knows she is an innocent caught up in things bigger than herself, and she is an orphan like him.

As fate would have it, just as she is about to freak out, along comes Zen in his lush yacht. After plucking Buck and Yong out of the drink, he makes Jackie an offer: turn over the anthrax, and he'll let Jackie keep the money (which it turns out was payment from Zen to Park for the virus) and take Yong away. The one hitch is that Jackie still doesn't know where the virus is even hidden. Of course, he eventually figures it out, and in what has to be a cinematic first, the evil villain does not get the merchandise then try to kill the hero. In fact, he takes the virus then lets Jackie leave with Yong just as he promised. Hey, he may force cute women to shoot up, and he may want to control the world's supply of anthrax, but at least he is a man of his word.

Carmen eventually resurfaces and reveals she is actually a CIA agent, exactly like the girl from Who Am I. No one seems all that surprised, though they do consider the whole trading anthrax for a girl thing to have been rather stupid, especially when it turns out Yong was injected with the anthrax. Advice: don't do things that will result in Jackie Chan seeking revenge on you.

The finale is another in the long line of big stunt pieces that rely on smashing up vehicles more than smashing up people, as Buck, Zen, assorted thugs, and a truck driving family all find themselves speeding down the highway in a variety of vehicles, including posh sedans, goofy looking motorbikes, and a burning petrol tanker. You may think it's zany, but it's just another daily commute for a guy like Jackie Chan. The finale is pretty fun even if it isn't kungfu. I figured we'd gotten our fair share of kicks throughout the film, so a big exploding gas truck flying off a bridge was perfectly in order. Ever notice how all these out of control heavy vehicles always get out of control near highway construction and half finished bridges? Just once, I'd like to see someone have to drive a hundred miles before they are able to jump out and drive the truck off a half-finished bridge or something.

After that, the movie ends about five times in the course of a couple minutes. There's the epilogue involving Buck and Eric Tsang's character, who is of course revealed to be more than he initially let on. This also fulfills Jackie's requirement to end some of his films with a really tasteless disease joke. In Drunken Master II we had to endure the stupid "blind retard" ending to what was an otherwise amazing film. This time it's a joke about snorting the ashes of a man who died of cancer. Ha ha. Those Hong Kong people! What cards!

But the movie doesn't end there. Oh sure, the credits role, and we get the prerequisite bloopers, but then the movie starts back up again with Jackie getting offered a spy job, traveling to Italy, and riding around while wearing a fake "mama mia that's a spicy meatball!" mustache. So I guess he didn't take his old job at the fitness store back. Anyway, if this is his way of saying, "If this movie does well, I'll make a sequel," then that's cool with me. Like I said at some point way up there, a lot of people have been lukewarm or downright negative about this film, but I thought it was pretty good.

The film's only real drawback is the Sammo Hung-esque schizophrenia in its tone. I mean, for a good hour we're treated to very typical and enjoyable action-comedy, and then all of a sudden there's this whole depressing heroin subplot out of nowhere. The movie turns deadly grim for a while, then decides to get all slapstick again for the final scene. The hell? It reminded me of Pedicab Driver directed by and starring Sammo Hung (who was famous for changing the mood of his films in the blink of an eye). Like Accidental Spy, that movie starts out as a slapstick action comedy, then turns into a fairly devastating, dark, and angry tragedy. It's cool to keep people off balance, but it doesn't entirely work in Accidental Spy. Instead of raising the intensity, it just detracts from the overall enjoyment. It's almost like it was just some sort of an afterthought.

Other than that -- and I can live with it -- I thought the movie was fun. It's got plenty of action, and just about all of it is great. The script is harmless, which is about the best we can expect from a Jackie Chan film. It doesn't try to be too clever, and that's good. The location work is great, and the movie's budget is on the screen. It's almost like Jackie intentionally set out to reclaim his spot as Hong Kong's most expensive film maker -- a title he has held on and off ever since the globe-trotting shenanigans of Operation Condor. You didn't think Jackie was going to sit back and let Storm Riders keep that honor, did you?

The acting is passable to good, with Min Jeong Kim's Carmen being the one big exception. It looks like this was her first role, so I'll cut her some slack, but she was pretty bad. I know traditionally the English language acting in Hong Kong productions has not been very important, but when over half the movie is actually done in English, you need to pay closer attention to who is doing the talking. Min Jeong Kim sounds like she's reading her lines for the first time in several scenes. The other people who do their acting in English are okay, but that's because they are either Jackie Chan, angry young Turks, or the black CIA guy whose only job is to grimace and say, "You really screwed things up!"

Vivian Hsu does alright. I didn't expect much of her, but she actually made me care to some degree about her character, though she could use some work on conveying certain emotions. She accomplishes her withdrawal scenes by sniffling a lot. Maybe she should have watched Gene Hackman freak out and scream about the Lakers or whatever during his detox scenes in French Connection II. Hell, I'd pay good money to see cute, sad looking little Vivian Hsu screaming incoherently about basketball while she rolls around on the floor.

I will say this about both Min Jeong Kim and Vivian Hsu -- they manage to be a whole hell of a lot less annoying than those women from Mr. Nice Guy, who I was actually hoping might get killed at some point just so they'd shut the hell up. Min Jeong Kim is a bad actress, and Vivian Hsu is just sort of there, but at least neither of them grated and annoyed. When it comes to female sidekicks in a Jackie Chan film, about the best you can hope for is that they won't drive you insane, and neither of the gals here ever got that bad and whiny.

The director of the film, Teddy Chan, is someone I expect great things from. He's one of the big names behind what I hope will prove to be the rebirth of the Hong Kong film industry. With films like Purple Storm and Downtown Torpedoes under his belt -- both of which I thought were tremendous amounts of fun -- he seems heading down the right path. In Accidental Spy he shows the most skill at figuring out how to direct Jackie since Sammo Hung or Jackie himself. Stanley Tong was amazing at making Jackie seem dull and lackluster, which must take a lot of work. Benny Chan (another name I expect to deliver big things) did pretty good with Who Am I, which I've already pointed out is very similar to this film. Teddy Chan seems to click best out of any of the new guys working with Chan. The film has good pacing, and Teddy knows when to lay off the "directing" and just let Jackie do his stuff. He manages to use the camera to augment Jackie's skills while covering up the fact that the guy is slowing down and can't perform like he used to.

Also of no

The desire to mimic James Bond and, in doing so, perhaps mimic a little of the success, was hardly the sole property of America and Europe, however. Bond was as big in Asia as he was everywhere else in the world, and Asian film industries were just as quick to cash in on the trend with their own particular twist on the superspy genre. As with their European counterparts, a good many of these films are impressive and fun despite having smaller budgets than Bond. The Asian spy films were able to compensate for the financial difference the same way European movies did, exploiting the one thing American films of the same nature did not have: location. Eurospy films could "trot the globe" for peanuts considering how easy it is to go to a different country in Europe. Since many of the films were often co-productions between two or more nations, even a modestly bankrolled Eurospy actioner could find itself in Paris, Rome, Venice, Milan, London, Berlin, Madrid, or any number of lavish locales in between. In Asia, it was much the same, and a production from Japan or Hong Kong could actually save money in many cases by trotting down south and shooting the exotic scenery of Thailand or Indonesia. Both continents had built-in globe-trotting at their disposal.

Cheap American spy films, on the other hand, were stranded. Where were they going to go? New York, Los Angeles, and Vegas may seem exotic in an international context, but there was nothing in any of those cities Americans hadn't seen a million times before. Sure we had Hawaii, but shoestring budget exploitation films couldn't afford to fly there any more than they could fly to Tokyo or Copenhagen. Unlike Asian and European exploitation film crews, American crews were pretty much stuck, which is why so many of the American offerings in the genre are so dull, trying to pass California suburbs off as Prague or St. Petersburg. No one wants to watch a spy jet set off to Iowa or Toronto.

Of the Asian countries who got in on the spy craze, Japan had the best-known films outside of their own market. The Japanese films tended to seize upon the most eye-catching pop-art aspects of the genre and blow them up tenfold into something that resembled a sumptuous blend of James Bond, Modesty Blaise, Alfred Hitchcock's many espionage thrillers, and Barbarella. Although less well-known than their Japanese brethren, and often slightly less polished, Hong Kong's entries into 1960s spymania are nothing to sneeze at, and some of them take the pop-art psychedelia even further than it was taken in Japan. Unfortunately, where finding old Japanese spy films can be difficult but eventually rewarding, digging up Hong Kong spy films was a study in unending frustration. The films simply weren't in circulation anymore - at least until recently.

When the Shaw Brothers studio finally sold its vast film library for distribution on DVD, it meant that along with all the kungfu adventures for which the Shaws were best known in the West, we'd also be seeing some of their forays into espionage films, and if we were seeing what the Shaws had to offer, then we were doubtless seeing some of the best, or at least most expensive, examples of what Hong Kong had to offer. One of the first of the Shaw Brothers spy films to find its way back into the light is not exactly a spy film, but neither were a lot of the European films that became part of the genre. As long as someone was wearing a smart suit and being shot at by guys in sunglasses, then we can call it a spy film. Golden Buddhas has more than enough of that to keep fans of cloak and dagger doings happy, not to mention the fact that it has sexy ladies, hidden treasure, exotic locales, and a fat guy in a gold lame super-villain outfit. And I haven't even begun to describe the lair.

Golden Buddhas begins with our dashing man Paul Chang Chung as Paul, which is convenient. Chang is a top notch "dashing" lead, certainly better than contemporary Peter Chan Ho, who was plenty likeable but rarely believable as the suave ladies' man he often played. Chang is another one of those men they just don't seem to make anymore. He's not quite a Cary Grant, but he reminds me a lot of Toho Studio's number one super-suave leading man from the same era, Akira Takarada. What all three of those gents have in common (and what would later be embodied by men like Chow Yun-fat and...well, just Chow Yun-fat, I guess) is the ability to lend an everyman quality to sheer elegance, or maybe it's adding a touch of sheer elegance to an everyman character. As James Bond, Sean Connery had class to spare, but existed at an unobtainable level. No one could be James Bond. He never had to deal with the mundane aspects of life, like doing laundry or going grocery shopping. The elegant everyman, as defined by Cary Grant, was clever and sophisticated and charming, but he was also real, or at least more real than James Bond. Grant may still be jetting around fighting international villains, but you also see him staying in crummy hotel rooms, struggling to cook himself some dinner, going to a regular job, things of that nature. They were real-life flares that made Cary Grant's persona seem almost obtainable, because we saw him dealing with the normal stuff.

The same goes for Akira Takarada and Paul Chang Chung. The characters they played were always smartly dressed and one step ahead of the game, but they also had everyman qualities and problems that made them seem more believable. James Bond created a myth, something one could aspire to but never hope to actually achieve. The elegant Everyman, on the other hand, was something that you could hope to one day become if you could just turn off the GameCube and stop scratching your ass while making lunch long enough to learn a little something about presenting yourself with a degree of class and respectability.

Paul Chang Chung's Paul is a businessman on his way to Singapore to seal some manner of deal. On the flight, he meets and old friend from the judo club who is on his way to Bangkok to attend to some sort of family business. Both men carry the same briefcase. Can you guess what happens? When Paul is forced by inclement weather to stay an extra day in Bangkok, he discovers the mistaken briefcase identities and decides to use his time in Thailand to get the proper case back. Well, first he gets sidetracked to a massage parlor full of willing girls, then he goes to get the case back. I mean, a man's got to have his priorities straight, doesn't he?

The problem with getting back his own briefcase gets complicated when he discovers his old friend with a rather large stiletto knife stuck in his chest. Paul isn't too terribly upset. I guess they weren't close friends, just old friends. He grabs the contents of his briefcase, shovels them into his friend's briefcase, and heads home intent to not get tangled up in the whole affair. That would be fine if it weren't for the fact that assassins and thugs are suddenly coming out of the woodwork and chasing after Paul, demanding that he turn over to them the secret of the Golden Buddha - a small statuette he discovered in his friend's briefcase. Before too long, Paul is on the run and trying to figure out the riddle that will, with aide from his friend's beautiful sister and portly brother, unlock a fortune in buried treasure. The key to the whole affair lies inside the Buddha, and inside the two Buddha's possessed by the victim's brother and sister. In a refreshing twist, the police are involved but Paul is not on the run from them or mistaken as his friend's killer or anything like that. The cops just sort of like to hang around and pretend they are reading papers.

The premise is simple enough, but the thrill is always in the execution, and director Lo Wei delivers a tightly paced adventure film that never feels especially serious but also never veers into total comedy. In retrospect, it's tempting to apply the term "camp" to a film of this nature, but camp implies a certain degree of intention on behalf of the filmmaker to spoof a certain genre or turn the wackiness way up a la the old Batman television series. There's nothing in Golden Buddhas to make one think they weren't taking the film seriously. It's outlandish, yes, and certainly garish and over the top, but it lacks the wink - and, thankfully, the smarminess - of most films that put themselves forward as camp.

It doesn't matter, really, I suppose. Campy or not, all that counts is whether the film is enjoyable, and Golden Buddhas definitely delivers the goods. Being able to make a film fast-paced but coherent, quick moving but not hyperactive and short of thought, seems to be a lost art form. Many contemporary films feel they must either be slow and ponderous or edited so choppily in that MTV style so as to cause seizures in a good many viewers, primarily because these films rely entirely on action scenes to propel the movie forward and provide the sense of pace. A film like Golden Buddhas, or a James Bond film, knows that there are other ways to keep the plot feeling fast without relying on explosions and jump cuts set to blaring techno music. And of course few were better than Hitchcock at being able to inject non-action scenes with a sense of urgency and tension. Films from the 1960s in particular, knew how to use characters and dialogue to keep your interest.

That's just what Golden Buddhas does. There is plenty of action, most of it in the form of energetic but dreadfully choreographed fist fights, but the film doesn't rely solely on those scenes - which, given the quality of the fights, is probably wise. The character of Paul is, like many of the characters in this and similar films, one dimensional. But it's a good dimension, and the script makes the most of it. He's a good guy, handy with a gun or a judo throw, not above bedding a beautiful dame in the name of, well, bedding beautiful dames. He is, in a word, likeable. He's charismatic, and that makes him interesting even if he's not a deep and complex study of the human psyche. When you have interesting characters, it goes along way to giving you an interesting film, a film where you don't have to rely on special effects and explosions to keep the viewer's attention.

The other characters are predictable, but that's not a negative. After all, spy films became popular because they followed a formula and found ways to tweak and alter the formula while still staying true to it, like how I started adding a dash of molasses to my recipe for Kentucky Derby Pie. Paul finds himself with two women in his life, as the hero in spy films often did - and remember, I realize this isn't a spy film per se, but it has enough of the genre clichés to keep it in the company of your finer Eurospy films. One woman is noble and good, the other is sinister and evil. Both are sexy. We start out with Fanny Fan, who is an absolute drop-dead bombshell of a vixen with sex appeal in spades. She starred in at least one other Lo Wei-directed spy caper for the Shaw's, 1967's wonderful Angel With Iron Fists. If she didn't make a lot more movies than I've turned up, then it's a real shame because she has a beauty and a body that will turn your head and keep it in that position. She's wonderful as the femme fatale of the piece, an operative of the mysterious Skeleton Gang who is out to steal the secret of the Golden Buddha before Paul and his allies can solve it.

And she shows off her derriere. That may sound base and piggish, but it's also worth noting since this film was made in 1966, a time when bare bottoms were still rare in anything but b-grade exploitation and those nudie cuties about Florida nudist colonies being menaced by a gorilla. Our introduction to Fanny's fanny while fully clothed in a tight mod dress and swaying provocatively back and forth as she sashays down the hallway is plenty good, to boot, or should I say to booty? Oh, that was just awful.

Okay, enough about naked behinds. I can try and pass it off as my professional interest in Hong Kong cinema's willingness to pursue nudity in a mainstream film while the supposedly more liberated West was still playing things coy, but in the end - so to speak - you know the basic fact behind the matter is that I simply appreciate nudity. I appreciate Fanny Fan Lai. Put the two together, and well, you can figure it out.

Our more modest heroine is Jeanette Lin Tsui as the sister of Paul's murdered friend and possessor of one third of the Golden Buddhas's secret (her older brother has the other third). What Jeanette lacks in terms of Fanny Fan's bombshell appeal she more than makes up for with an enchanting beauty, graceful demeanor, and plenty of elegant 1960s dresses. For the most part, she's not nearly as actively involved in things as your better Bond girls from the same time. By 1966, we'd seen Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore doling out judo throws (Goldfinger) and Claudine Auger as Domino doling out harpoon guns to the chest (Thunderball). Jeanette's damsel-in-distress is less interesting for her lack of ability, but she's not entirely useless. She at least cracks a vase over a guy's head and, as far as I remember, never trips and falls while running away from the bad guys. That's got to count for something.

The supporting cast rounds things out nicely. A young Wo Ma (or younger, anyway) plays one of the cops, who as I mentioned earlier, made me happy by being ineffectual (as always) for most of the film but not resorting to the tired old "mistaking the hero for the killer" routine. People know Wo Ma best for his parts later in life, such as the Taoist ghost slayer in Chinese Ghost Story. He spends most of his time here reading papers on the street corner. Director Lo Wei himself makes an appearance as the villain of the piece, and I have to say this is one of the greatest screen villains of all time, not so much for his character, which is typical and somewhat uninspired, but for his fashion sense, which would send even 1970s-style David Bowie or Elton John into a fit.

The man wears amber sunglasses, a shiny gold foil suit (with standard "evil villain" high collar), black knee-high boots, and a cape with a giant pointy collar. Now that, my friends, is a quality megalomaniac villain's wardrobe. While Pierce Brosnan may have brought back the era of a hero with keen fashion sense, the villains of today are woefully inadequate when it comes to selecting the proper attire for trying to throttle the world with your iron grip. These days, they're all in dull brown military uniforms and business casual from J. Crew. Hardly any villains these days wear capes, let alone a gold foil Nehru jacket. Where's the style? Where's the flamboyant flare that lets the world know you are not a man to be trifled with? The leader of Golden Buddhas's ruthless Skeleton Gang - now there is a man who knows how to dress the part.

That, in fact, leads to what may very well be my favorite part in the entire film. I'm not going to spoil anything when I tell you Paul manages to foil the evil plans of the Skeleton Gang, which were pretty small considering what a lavish lair they have. For an organization with tentacles in all parts of the world, with a vast space age underground lair and hundreds of henchmen and attractive female agents, you'd think they'd set their heights a little higher than recovering a small chest of jewelry. I'm sure it was valuable stuff, but I bet the Skeleton Gang spent twice as much as it was worth just trying to get the thing, which is especially silly when you realize after the not entirely shocking twist that they could have basically had the thing for free with almost no effort. Anyway, once Paul foils their plans we get a lovely shot of the gang and their leader being hauled off like common crooks by the cops - still decked out in all his outrageous supervillain gear. I bet he'll be especially popular wearing that in some dark, dirty Bangkok jail cell.

The leader's fabulous outfit is simply one part of the overall beautiful look of the film. The budget may have been smaller than a Bond budget, but it seems to have been larger than the budget for your average Eurospy film, or at least better utilized. The film looks grand, full of eye-popping color and space-age décor. The Skeleton Gang's lair is a thing of beauty. Ken Adam himself, the set designer for the Bond films, would be impressed by what Lo Wei and crew managed to pull of with much more limited resources. The thing is an amalgamation of every swanky space station, secret lair, and bachelor pad ever seen on the screen. When the film isn't traipsing about the labyrinthine corridors of the evil lair, it's reclining in an exotic lounge, parading around a series of gorgeous Thai travelogue footage, and otherwise taking advantage of the fact that Shaw Bros. productions threw together some of the most beautiful sets ever.

Of course, not everything is perfect with Golden Buddhas. The plot does have at least one major hole, which I mentioned above. Absolutely nothing in the movie was necessary. The Skeleton Gang could have recovered the treasure of the Golden Buddhas with almost no effort, but they chose instead to go running about shooting at things, getting into judo fights, and ruining a variety of lattice work. Luckily, the film is enough fun for you not to really care, and given the clothes the leader of the gang favors, it's possible he's simply not all there and the easy route never occurred to him. Of course, the easy route rarely makes for an interesting film, either.

The other strike against the film is the abysmal fight choreography. There are a few shootouts, but most of the action comes via fisticuffs, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a worse example of how to stage fights. Even the fight scenes in those Frankie Avalon beach parties were better than the ones here. It's not that they aren't energetic - every time there is a fight, Paul Chang Chung and his opponents go at it with gusto, flinging each other across the room, through the windows, bouncing across the bed, things of that nature. The problem lies in the fact that not a single punch lands anywhere near its target, and everyone does that jerky "turn my head to the left, then to the right, then up, then down" movement when they're being hit. The film fares better when Paul breaks out his judo moves, and one fight scene between him and another judo master after Fanny Fan is drugged by her own treachery is actually decent. But most of the fights are straight-up fisticuffs, and they look really awful. It can't be excused by the film's date, either. By 1966, we'd seen plenty of superb fight scenes, many of them in other films from the Shaw Bros. studios. Golden Buddhas loves a fight scene, but it can't execute one very well. Still, the energy and the fact that the film is basically one wild, outlandish ride make the awful fight choreography enjoyable despite itself.

Finally, while the acting is relatively solid throughout, one has to question the matter-of-fact nonchalantness with which Paul handles the mysterious murder of his friend. We can assume at first that he simply wasn't all that close to the guy, and that would be understandable. But then he goes through all this crazy mess with the Golden Buddha statues, risks his life, and when asked why explains that it's because the dead guy was his friend, and he owes him. Ah well, nothing to get annoyed over. After all, do we want to watch Paul Chang Chung bed Fanny Fan, judo chop everyone in sight, and run around in a space-age secret lair, or do we want to watch him cry and question how life could be so cruel?

Golden Buddhas is tremendous fun and a real treat for fans of 1960s spy films despite there being no actual spies in the film. It's still got plenty of intrigue and sneaking about, and the production is sumptuous. Fans of zany 1960s art direction will be in heaven. The plot won't keep you guessing from beginning to end, and it does have that one giant hole, but otherwise it's fairly serviceable and keeps things moving at a brisk but not thoughtless pace. Best of all, the mysterious treasure turns out to be actual treasure, and not some note that says, "Peace on Earth" or something.

Not that I'm one to judge a movie solely on the merits of its leading lady's rump nor on its inclusion of what is still, in my opinion, the paramount of women's pant technology. You know me. I'm a classic guy with classic tastes, and while booty shorts and flares may be alright for some of you, I'll take the more demure and alluring look of capri pants, a nice cocktail dress, or one of those cheongsam dresses any day over the vulgar obviousness or careless sloppiness of today's fashion. But that's just me, and like I said, you can't judge a movie purely on it's willingness to cater to my retro taste in both male and female fashion or my longing for a return to the days when we wore clothing that actually fit us.

Luckily, the film that follows the rump-shaking opening is a wonderful, breezy affair from the heyday of Hong Kong cinema. It was a time when the silver screen was ruled by the likes of Linda Lin Dai and the subject of this particular movie, Grace Chang. Grace was the reigning queen of Cathay Studios, one of the greatest and most respected studios in the history of Asian film. Few and far between were the films that didn't feature Grace singing, dancing, and flashing her million dollar smile at the camera. She was the total package - a wonderful singer, a unique beauty, and an utterly captivating actress. Unfortunately, the bulk of her work - and indeed the bulk of Cathay's films in general - were unknown outside of Asia. They disappeared after their initial theatrical runs, and only a few ever showed up on any home video format. When the rare film did make it to video or DVD, it was almost always without subtitles. Thus, some of the most important films and names in Hong Kong's impressive cinematic history remained virtually unknown to new viewers.

In 2003, however, fortune smiled on fans of classic cinema from around the globe when Panorama Entertainment inked a deal to release a slew of old Cathay films on DVD complete with English subtitles. Though the deal was less trumpeted than Celestial's similar deal to tap the hitherto hidden history of the Shaw Bros. Studio for home consumption, it was certainly no less historic or important. And while the fact that most of the Cathay films are dramas, musicals, and comedies in black and white means that western Hong Kong film fans (traditionally very action film oriented) will be paying less attention to them than to the Shaw Bros. releases, any film buff worth his or her salt knows that just because a film isn't in color and doesn't feature a shirtless Ti Lung getting stabbed in the belly doesn't mean it isn't worth watching. For fans of filmmaking from the glorious decades of the 1950s and 1960s, the tapping of the Cathay well is a glorious event.

It's fitting that Panorama's Cathay releases are hitting the shelves the same time as the Shaw Bros. releases. They were, of course, the primary competition for the Shaws (and both studios shared some major stars, including the impish Peter Chan Ho and the regal Linda Lin Dai), and their history is similar to that of the Shaw Bros. Like Shaw, Cathay had its roots in Southeast Asia. Studio founder Loke Wan Tho began making films in the late 1930's when his family began establishing theaters in Singapore. As was often the case at the time, companies who made movies usually also owned their own theater chains (a practice that is coming somewhat back into vogue with the establishment of UA theaters in America. It never really went out of vogue in Asia). Loke's theaters were state-of -the-art, and after the close of World War II he cemented a deal to distribute British Rank films in South Asia. In the 1950's, Loke moved the business to Hong Kong, purchased a studio lot, and formed MP & GI, which would later change its name to Cathay.

As with the Shaw Studios, Cathay was keen on seeking out and developing new talent, then signing them to exclusive contracts. While the Shaws initially had a good balance of male and female superstars that, during the 1970s, eventually became primarily male-dominated thanks to the popularity of Shaw kungfu films, Cathay was always a woman's world that was known for a stunning array of actresses who easily overshadowed their male counterparts at nearly every moment. Cathay built its success around a core group of female stars that included Linda Lin Dai, Jeanette Lin, Julie Yeh Feng, Lucilla You, Betty Loh Ti, Li Mei, and of course Grace Chang, among others. Cathay films and stars were highly regarded by critics and fans alike, and the studio exhibited a consistently high quality in the vast majority of what it produced. But, as we all know, nothing gold can stay, especially eras.

By the mid-60's the studio began to decline. Loke died in a plane crash in 1964, and the Shaw Brothers productions began to eclipse those of Cathay. The Shaws simply had more money to throw into their projects, and they lured away a number of Cathay's biggest stars, chief among them Linda Lin Dai. By the end of the decade, the Cathay Studio had lost nearly all direction. Whimsical romantic comedies and dramas, especially in black and white, were no longer as popular as they had once been. Cathay was sold to a young upstart studio that would eventually do to the Shaw Bros. what the Shaws ultimately did to Cathay - drive it out of business. That upstart studio was Golden Harvest, the eventual home of everyone from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan.

But there for a while, no one could match Cathay in terms of star power and picture quality. And if your studio has to have a poster girl, you can sure do a heck of a lot worse than Grace Chang. It doesn't take long to immediately fall in love with her and start putting her name atop your list of favorite actresses. There's something special about her, something unique. She's not a classic beauty, but that makes her beauty all the more memorable. Her popularity is, instead, driven by her undeniable charisma and overpowering charm. Where Hollywood (and indeed Hong Kong) was full of sultry sirens and bombshells, Grace Chang was the woman you could always trust to be your friend, to be dependable and friendly and down to earth. You could also count on her to sing you a song. Unlike many actresses who were featured prominently in Hong Kong musicals, Grace could belt out her own tunes.

Grace was born in 1934 in Nanjing but grew up in Shanghai. It was there, in what was far and away the mainland's most cosmopolitan and swinging city, that she trained in Peking Opera. After the tumult of World War II and the Chinese Civil War, Grace and her family moved to Hong Kong in 1949. She made her film debut in Seven Sisters (1953) and joined MP & GI in 1955. Her film and singing careers soared after that, and she quickly became one of the top stars of stage and screen. Her singing talent even garnered her an appearance on America's Dinah Shore Show. She married in 1964, and like most Hong Kong actresses, her marriage heralded her virtual retirement from show business. She still makes occasional appearances though, and she's left us a tremendous film legacy that new fans are only just now beginning to discover.

Mambo Girl, the first of Panorama's Cathay DVD releases (and chronologically, the earliest film), is an excellent way to get to know the work of both the studio and Grace Chang. Although for the most part it's a breezy musical comedy, unlike most films from that particularly light-hearted genre, it has a darker, more serious current running through it that allows it to make a social comment without seeming too heavy-handed. As the story of the making of the film goes, Grace was performing for troops in Taiwan and had them so enthralled with her mambo dancing that they started calling her Mambo Girl. Scriptwriter Yi Wen was then inspired by her popularity to write a quick little film around the name. Another story, as told by Grace herself, maintains that the idea for the film came during an evening at a nightclub where Cathay founder Loke was so impresses with her dancing and singing that he decided a movie should be made. Whichever version of the story is true, the fact remains that someone somewhere saw Grace singing and dancing and simply had to make a movie for her where she could do the same.

Grace stars as Li Kia-ling, the celebrated Mambo Girl as she is known on campus. She's the all-American (or All-Hong Kong, I suppose) gal who gets good grades, always treats her fellow students with equality and respect, and is a vastly talented singer and dancer. I guess they don't have students like this anymore. They've sort of gone the way of those 1950s scientists who knew everything about history, geology, astronomy, physics, and handling various handguns and rifles. I suppose its students like Grace Change who grow up to be those professional know-it-alls like John Agar, though I have a hard time imagining John Agar busting out the mambo moves.

Kia-ling's life is pretty good. Aside from being the sweetheart of the campus, she has a cool little sister and a father who owns a toy store and, when neighbors come by to ask them to turn down the mambo music, tells the neighbors to take a hike. Rather than being the movie parent who attempts to crush the musical dreams of his child, he encourages her at every step and is just about the coolest movie dad you could hope for. Her father is played by Liu Enjia, probably one of the best male leads at Cathay and one of their only men to not be overshadowed by the ladies. He's a big, fat jolly guy, after all, and it's hard to overshadow big, fat jolly guys. He was Cathay's go-to man whenever they needed a solid father figure, and he's best known for his roles here and in the successful cross-cultural comedy The Greatest Civil War on Earth.

All the boys at school fawn over Kia-ling, chief among them Peter Chan Ho. If you watch enough musicals and comedies from either Cathay or the Shaw Bros., you better get used to Peter Chan Ho. He seems to star in dang near every one of them, and for a relatively average looking guy, he's managed to romance everyone from Grace Chang to Linda Lin Dai to Cheng Pei-pei. I really wish I had this guy's agent. Peter's a ubiquitous fixture in the musical films of the 60s and 70s, and he's a pretty likable guy who emanates an everyman kind of charm. He's not always believable in his roles, especially when he plays a lady killer kind of character, but he has a certain underdog charisma about him that, while not nearly as magical as Grace's, makes you root for the guy. When Peter and the boys aren't studying, and they rarely seem to study, they're following Kia-ling around and urging her to sing and dance. You know the scene. It's been in countless musicals, and in the background is always a guy I simply know as Tennis Racket Lad. If you ever seen a musical comedy set at the beach, a college campus, or a summer resort, then you've probably spied the Tennis Racket Lad. He's the guy in the chorus of nameless friends who, when song and dance breaks out, always has a tennis racket which he pretends to strum like a guitar. I've seen Tennis Racket lad in at least a dozen films, and I'm sure he shows up in a dozen more.

Kia-ling's life is turned upside down when her little sister discovers the older sibling she idolizes is in fact adopted. When she confesses this to her best friend, who also happens to be incredibly jealous of Kia-ling's popularity with the boys, the girls, the teachers, the janitors, and everyone else in Hong Kong, word gets around to Kia-ling's friends, and eventually to Kia-ling herself. Although her rival tries to make it a point to insult our darling Mambo Girl, none of her friend seem to care. She's much too charming, and her adopted parents are so cool anyway. Kia-ling, however, is upset by the revelation and wants to seek out her real mother. Along the way, she will discover the true meaning of family, and there will be many musical numbers.

Running just under the surface is a message about the many Chinese people finding themselves in Hong Kong, especially after the revolution and Mao's increasingly totalitarian (and deadly) handling of the country. Multitudes of Mainlanders suddenly found themselves separated from their motherland and seeking shelter in the arms of Hong Kong. Seeing parallel between Kia-ling and the Mainland immigrants, between her choice of biological mother or adopted parents versus mother China or the adopted homeland of Hong Kong, doesn't take a genius. But it does, as I said, lend the film a deeper quality than one usually finds in these sorts of films.

Let's face it though, no one is going to seek out a musical comedy called Mambo Girl in hopes of gleaning insight into the mental state of Chinese people seeking to make new lives for themselves in Hong Kong. For a movie like this, what it has on the surface is just as important, if not more so, than what lies beneath. And the surface of Mambo Girl is a pure delight. Grace's performance is wonderful, and the music is catchy and enjoyable. As one would guess from the title, much of the music is infused with a Latin vibe, something that was very popular with lots of pop music from the era. Grace's mambo numbers swing, though the lyrics are just about the squarest things imaginable. I doubt Yma Sumac or other mambo legends belted out words like, "You're a lucky girl. We call you the Mambo Girl. You are the sweetheart in your family. You are the queen in the school." Not exactly lyrical spiciness to go with the beat, but the infectious tunes will stick with you regardless of how corny the words may be.

The musical numbers are nothing lavish. They're fairly well grounded in reality and most take place in nightclubs, sporting fields, or people's living rooms. The dances aren't extravagant either, but instead look like something an actual person might do. Well, make that an actual person who knows how to mambo and cha-cha. If I was the "actual" person, it'd look less like a dance and more like some old man having a seizure. The fact that movie embraces these modern dances and modern modes of dress so energetically is also a mark of distinction. Many films of the era reflect old fashioned mores regarding singing and dancing, especially as a way of life. How many movies are there where a woman falls upon hard times and is forced to eek out an existence as a nightclub singer, a profession that garners her much attention but no respect? Kia-ling's parents, on the other hand, break from tradition by enthusiastically supporting their daughter's talents and preaching the benefits to mind and body of having some good, clean fun. It is another way in which her adopted parents symbolize the new, modern Hong Kong and new, modern ideas. By contrast, Kia-ling's real mother is the type of lonely torch-singing forlorn woman we see in so many other movies. A product, if you will, of outdated thinking and ideals.

The supporting cast does their best to keep pace with the leading lady. Liu Enjia is wonderful as her father, Peter Chan Ho is likable as her boyfriend, and Kia-ling's real mother is suitably tragic in true melodrama form. For an interesting Shaw Bros connection, future Shaw empress Mona Fong (who was one of the major players as a producer at Shaw Bros, and quite possibly as powerful - if not more powerful - than the brothers who lent the studio their name) makes an appearance as a singer in a nightclub Kia-ling visits in search of her real mother. The real shining star among the supporting cast is Kitty Ting Hao as Kia-ling's younger sister. She's cute and energetic, and her performance is superb. Tragically, she was one among many of the Cathay stars who had a rocky life and ended it via suicide. She died in Los Angeles in 1967 at the age of twenty-seven. Similar sad stories seem to plague far too many of the Cathay women.

Despite that somber footnote, Mambo Girl is an energetic, fun, pluck-at-your-heartstrings musical that will win you over solely with the charm of its leading lady. It's a refreshing change of pace for people who know Hong Kong cinema primarily through kungfu films and more modern actioners. Mambo Girl takes the conventions of the Hollywood musical and integrates them seamlessly with Hong Kong sensibilities. Ultimately, you can't feel sad watching the movie, especially when the time rolls around for the big musical mambo finale. Relatively low-key in comparison to other musicals, even other black and white ones, it's a quality, retro romp that just might have you reaching for the nearest tennis racket.

At the same time, I hate a lot of big, dumb action movies like that third Die Hard film. Is this a contradiction? Hypocrisy? Well, don't try to figure me out. I'm one of those hedge mazes, baby, and you could get lost in my leafy green complexity.

Just because I don't need a film to be smart doesn't mean I don't want a film to be smart. It's icing on the cake. So I was delighted when I sat down to watch Nowhere to Hide, another in the increasingly long line of top-notch Korean action films I've been getting around to watching lately. On the surface it is a simple story of a cop chasing a killer. It plays to all the genre cliches that come with the territory: the cop is on the edge and has an unhappy (or non-existent) normal life, the criminal is cool and calculating, the cops are as brutal as the criminals, etc etc. If you were to read a simple plot synopsis, there would be nothing in it to suggest that Nowhere to Hide was anything more than a run-of-the-mill actioner no different than a thousand other films.

Obviously, I wouldn't have prefaced this whole thing with that bit about smart movies if there wasn't something more at play here than a run-of-the-mill action film.

There are, first and foremost, two rather spectacular things about the film that set it apart from the pack. First is the visual style, which manages to be unique even in today's atmosphere of style run rampant, with everyone seeming to forget that a movie needs more than "cool visuals" to be entertaining. If all you can do is make cool visuals, become a painter. We'll get to that later, because what I want to discuss first is the more subtle thing going on in Nowhere to Hide, primarily because it's something that doesn't get discussed too much since everyone is busy obsessing over the visual style and forgetting the rest of the film.

The most unique thing about this movie is it's near complete lack of gunplay. In a romantic comedy, this wouldn't be so spectacular a thing, but in an action film about out-of-control cops chasing a wily killer, one expects a certain amount of shooting to occur, or at least a certain amount of guys waving guns around over their head. Not so here, where guns are almost never a factor, save for one time. And in that one time, the fact that a gun has been used is a source of major concern for all involved. As such, at least from an American perspective, and from the perspective of someone who watches a lot of action films from all over the world, Nowhere to Hide is something surprising and unique, a counterbalance to the rather nonchalant use of guns in just about every other film in the genre.

No one would ever say that Hong Kong action films are free of gunplay. For American fans at least, John Woo defines Hong Kong action cinema (even if he was less popular in Hong Kong), and his movies are defined by the interaction of people and pistols. Even Jackie Chan, whose movies revolve around stunts and martial arts, frequently uses guns whenever he's playing a cop. In American films, guns are a given. The most famous cinematic cop in America is probably Dirty Harry, and nothing defined Harry like his Magnum. Even Nowhere to Hide's Korean contemporaries seem to embrace gun culture, as movies like Shiri were positively boiling over with high-caliber action. In each of these movies, and in many of the cultures themselves, guns are the first, easiest solution to any problem. Going into a dangerous situation? Go in with your gun drawn. Someone fighting with you? Point your gun at them and shut them up.

Detective Woo in Nowhere to Hide is, by any other measure, the proverbial cop on the edge. The big difference is that he doesn't use a gun. He doesn't even carry one, at least until the very end, and even then he is quite bad with it. Likewise, none of the men working with him use guns. Only one member of his force actually draws a gun during a dangerous situation, and the results are a source of torture for him from that moment on. On the flipside of the coin, none of the criminals use guns either. The main killer uses a sword, and when challenged, his fists. Everyone else, cops and criminals alike, seem to favor pipes and bats if they need a weapon. The distinct lack of guns in the film makes you call into question the entire concept of brutality and just what makes a brutal action film.

Because make no mistake about it, although it's a very twisted and offbeat comedy, Nowhere to Hide is a brutal film. Woo and his men are sadistic, constantly yearning for a fight, and not at all shy about beating confessions out of people. The sight of a cop socking a criminal in the jaw is considered brutal and abusive, thanks primarily to the flesh-on-flesh contact. For some reason, the same cop waving a gun in the face of the same unarmed man wouldn't really faze anyone so long as he didn't actually pull the trigger. So is it the firing of a gun that is brutal, or isn't the mere use of it even as a tool for intimidation, a way to get power over someone without a gun, something brutal as well? Why is the use of a gun so sanitized, so expected, and the use of a fist considered so base and animalistic? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Why is a fist fight savage but the use of a gun not?

Personally, and I'm no pop psychologist, I think we simply relate more to the sight of someone getting pounded like a side of beef being tenderized by an Iron Chef. The threat of a fist in the face is a lot more real to most people than the threat of ever having a gun pulled on them. It's something we all understand more. To put a real-life spin on it, I'm pretty nervous around any physical altercation that involves me, even if it's one I could win (and those are few and far between). The fist fights I've been in have always been a source of great anxiety for me. Conversely, the night Scott and I, along with our friend Todd, had a gun pulled on us, fear never even ran through my mind. It was just like, "Oh hell, let's just get this over with. I have things to do." By all accounts, the chances of someone with a gun killing me are higher than someone beating me to death with their bare hands, but I was a lot less scared looking down the barrel of a gun than I am looking at someone's knuckles flying toward my nose.

Part of that has to do with the remoteness of a gun. Pull the trigger, bam. It's over. It's not like having to duke it out with someone, which is far more intimate, and thus I think, far more personally affecting. It's cold, technical, and removed. I'm sure the gun freaks out there will beg to differ, or perhaps demand to differ, but for me, there's nothing personal about a gun, even the ones snipers use and talk to like they were their intimate lovers. It's still a machine, more or less. There's also, and again this is from the perspective of someone who doesn't care for guns, something less respectable about them. Sure, if someone is shooting at me, I'd probably wish I had one to shoot back, but it takes no special talent to use a gun on someone. Any jackass in Phat jeans can do it. You can be a scrawny, spineless little kid, but you can still pull the trigger and kill someone.

Having to get into a fist fight means you have to rely on yourself, and if you are like me, your ability to get in a few sucker punches and surprises that will end things before you get your ass kicked. You can't fake fighting well. You have to be good at it, or at least better than the person you are fighting. For me, and this is just my personal outlook (I make no condemnation on people who like having a gun around), there is something far more respectable about going at it fist-to-fist. There is something more respectable to me about getting your ass kicked in a fight than there is in winning the fight because you have a gun.

Here in the US, that we have a gun culture goes without saying, though the degree to which we worship the firearm has been put a little more into perspective with our recent glimpses into the average life of someone in, say, Afghanistan. Compared to them, we've still got a long way to go. At least our toddlers have to sneak the guns out of the house. But regardless of that, there's no denying that America and the gun live side by side. They're in our Constitution. They're strapped to our police officers and sometimes even our shopping mall rent-a-cops. More than a few private citizens have them. No matter how many teenagers and computer programmers bring them to school or work to shoot up their peers, cries of outrage are let loose in response to even the mildest form of gun control. When our police force confronts a hostile situation, they do so with guns drawn, primarily because the people opposing them probably have their guns drawn, and despite what those pugilists in the Boxer's Rebellion thought, bare flesh versus hard steel rarely works out to the advantage of the guy with the bare flesh. Case in point: how did the Boxers do?

Nowhere to Hide presents us with a culture that isn't obsessed with guns, and by doing so, even if it was unintentional, it calls into question the differences between the two cultures, something that action films rarely think to do. When confronted with a hostile situation, even one in which they don't know if the other side is armed, the response of the boys in Woo's pack consists of clenching their fists and getting ready for a brawl. The film opens with Woo himself busting a large gang with nothing but his fists to back up his words. Eventually some friends show up, but they all have pipes. No guns. True, it's easier for a police force to operate without relying on guns when the criminals have to do the same, but then, that's all part of living in a culture that has not so enthusiastically embraced the gun as a God given right rather than a reluctant last resort.

Despite all this, Woo is considered violent and out-of-control. His tactics of beating the crap out of people were shocking enough to raise the eyebrows of censors when the movie was recut for the American home video market. For some reason, punching a suspect is considered more violent than shooting at them, or threatening to shoot at them. Sure, I don't want a cop shooting at or punching me, but if I had to chose, even though a punch in the face scares me, I'd probably take it over a bullet to the head.

With this added layer of thought about guns and the nature of violence, about how we become desensitized to the use of a gun because the use of a gun is so impersonal, Nowhere to Hide is suddenly a lot more complex than the otherwise straight-forward plot might have some people believe.

Joong-Hoon Park plays Detective Woo, a squat, brutish looking guy in a leather coat and floppy LL Cool J hat. He reminds me of a less spherical version of the pro wrestler Tazz. Woo is part of a controversial homicide unit where they're willing to beat a confession out of anyone they know is a criminal, even if that person is a teenager or a woman. Still, the only real sidearm Woo carries is a pistol that shoots a relatively useless puff of mace that never seems to stop anyone. When asked by his partner if he wouldn't feel safer with a gun, Woo laughs at the suggestion. He's a fighter, and he'd much rather risk his life in a fist fight than take the coward's way out by pulling a gun. His partner, Kim (Dong-Kun Jang), is younger and less shy about letting a gun get him out of a sticky situation every now and again. Even so, it's rare that he ever uses it, preferring instead to simply let a lead pipe upside the head be his fighting advantage.

When a man is murdered, apparently as part of some sort of underworld power play, Woo and his team are assigned the investigation. Even the assassin, Sungmin (Sung-kee Ahn) doesn't bother with guns. In one of the film's many superb sequences, he hits his mark with a sword during a downpour out on the 40 Steps, a famous landmark in Inchon. His back-up thugs chase away the other guy's thugs again not with guns, but with bats and blades.

A few shakedowns here and there, and a particularly amusing fight between Woo and a big guy named Meathead, lead the cops to Juyon (Ji-Woo Choi), Sungmin's girlfriend. The fight between Woo and Meathead is yet another example of just how different this movie is from most other action films. In nearly any other film, Woo would have pulled a gun on Meathead and said, "Alright, let's get going," and that would have been the end of it, and we wouldn't have thought anything was wrong with that. Instead, Woo refuses to even give a gun a thought, wanting instead to have it out with Meathead and subdue him physically. Again, it's curious that simply pointing a gun at the guy and hauling him in is considered fine, but refusing to use a gun in favor of fighting your opponent unarmed is considered barbaric. You could say that the gun is a way to avoid the violence, and then someone else could counter that by saying that even pointing the gun at someone is a violent act.

Even when the cops are waiting for Sungmin at Juyon's place, none of them use guns. Once again, they all rely on fists and feet. When the fight turns into a chase, the cops could end it simply by pulling out a gun and yelling, "Freeze!" Once again, that wouldn't strike anyone as unusual, even if the criminals were unarmed. They don't do that however, because for them, and for this movie, the gun is not an answer. It's not a short-cut or a way to get work done without effort. The cops would rather run themselves ragged in a foot chase than turn to a gun to solve things for them.

Of course, that could also be part of the reason Sungmin is able to escape. In another moment of humor - and this film is an action-comedy (just not slapstick) - Woo fires his mace gun off wildly, even when Sungmin is nowhere to be seen or is far out of the pistols range of what looks to be about three feet. That thing really is useless, which may or may not be additional imagery pertaining to the movie's attitudes toward our societal reliance on guns.

The one time a gun is used is by Kim, when a crazed man holds a kid hostage using a straight razor. During a moment of confusion, Kim fires and kills the criminal. By all means, it is a justified shot, and most movies wouldn't even think twice about it, except maybe to add some silly one-liner to tie things up nicely. Here, however, the shooting becomes a source of great inner turmoil for Kim, who can't fully convince himself that shooting anyone is a brave or right thing to do. "Never forget this feeling," Woo tells him, showing that for all his willingness to beat someone up, even Woo considers the use of a gun with great gravity. At no point do they condemn it. They merely suggest that one should always remember the consequences and never let the use of a gun become standard practice.

From colorful fall nights to the snowy dead of winter, Woo and his men continue to track the elusive Sungmin, leading to a confrontation on a train (with Woo disguised as a drink vendor looking like Angus Young from AC/DC), and finally a showdown in a rain-drenched construction lot. In the final confrontation of the film, Woo finally resorts to a gun, but it is ultimately useless, and he throws it down into a puddle of mud in favor of settling the score with his fists. The outcome of the final fight is also a twist on what one would expect from this sort of film, but by the final moments, Nowhere to Hide has proven it's anything but just another "this type of film."

The uniqueness of the film's approach to violence and action is matched by its uniqueness in style and appearance. It switches from washed-out, grainy black and white to vibrant, rich, almost overwhelming color. It slams recklessly between slow-motion and regular speed. It toys with lighting, angles, and composition as freely as the script toys with the expectations of a "cop on the edge" story. It is a beautiful film to watch, and the visual flare manages to augment rather than overwhelm. Some people use visual flash as a way to mask weak stories and bad movies. In those moments, the visuals and the effects become the reason for the movie, the center of attention when they should be there to help tell the story instead of covering it up. Though some of the tricks in Nowhere to Hide have no real point, they never overwhelm the story, and they never become annoying. They are simply another layer of what is going on.

As I stated earlier, the plot is simple even if the execution is not. Each of the characters fulfills a genre stereotype, though always with enough of a twist to remind you that this isn't business as usual. Sungmin is easy to dismiss as the cool, brilliant criminal because he dresses smartly, and the villains are always cool and brilliant. The big difference here is that he's neither cool nor especially brilliant, at least not as we actually see him once you strip away expectations you bring in from other movies. His girlfriend is a regular, though quite beautiful, woman in her early thirties living a very simple middle class life despite the fact her boyfriend is an underworld assassin.

Sungmin himself says no more than a few words during the entire picture, and those words are merely an observation of something obvious about a door. He's able to elude the police because he's somewhat careful some of the time, but he still makes the mistake of visiting his girlfriend once her identity is known (and without checking the place out beforehand). His attempts to elude the police on the train are slightly less than genius as well. In fact, in the story presented, there is nothing at all to suggest that Sungmin is brilliant, or even somewhat smart, or that he is a great criminal. These are all expectations we bring in with us, and it's something of a surprise to realize the movie has not played to those expectations. Instead, it's played on them.

By the same token, Woo and Kim are supposed to be the archetypal rogue cops, the kind who ruffle the feathers of the higher ups and always give the mayor a headache. Again, those are character traits we bring into the film with us and which the film quickly subverts. Rather than being angered by the violence, Woo's captain is annoyed that the men can't get more information with it. Despite the fact that they regularly beat up suspects during interrogation, there is never any indication that Woo and his men are ever disciplined from higher up or that anyone looks upon their actions with disgust or moral outrage.

By the book, Woo should be the hothead and his partner should be the by-the-books type. Instead, they're both hotheads, and it's the partner who tends to get careless with the gun. Although he's a bad-ass, Woo is also a human character. Though he loves a good fight, he doesn't always win them. A visit to his sister ends with him donning his new pair of gloves (a gift from the previous year's Christmas that he never opened) and frolicking off into the snowy night like a little kid. We do get the requisite talk about how the lines between cops and criminals are blurred, and how Woo only became a cop to keep himself from becoming a thug, but those are never central themes in the movie since, by comparison, the criminals get next to no screen time.

Despite somewhat broadly drawn characters, the movie manages to personalize Woo and Sungmin's girlfriend, Juyon. Even Sungmin develops a character despite saying almost nothing and only being on screen a few minutes. I guess he's sort of like Boba Fett. Again, it's because we all carry preconceptions of what these characters should be, and the movie allows us to fill them in and mold them slightly to our liking. You could write it off as shallow characterization, but I think it's too effective at drawing you in to be so hastily dismissed. Despite his thuggishness, it's hard not to like Woo. He may hit people, but he won't shoot them. He is never anyone other than who he is, and that's a refreshing honesty. His scenes with Juyon, the world-weary woman who has gotten involved in more than she wants to deal with, lend an air of melancholy to the film. These are, at heart, two very lonely characters who will find no release from their solitude. Sungmin will either be captured or disappear forever. Woo will always spend his evenings on a stake-out or sitting alone at home cooking up some ramen on a camping stove in the middle of his floor.

It helps the characters to have such accomplished actors behind them. Joong-Hoon Park is utterly superb as Woo, managing to drum up fondness for a guy who could be very easy to dislike if handled incorrectly by the actor. Instead, he comes across like a bully big brother who, just as you start to dislike him, does something really meaningful and sweet. Sung-kee Ahn as Sungmin is also accomplished, and by far the most experienced of the main cast. It is the quiet grace and strength with which he carries himself that allows you to fill in his character. That he can leave such an impression with so little time on screen is quite a feat. Ji-woo Choi is simply stunning, but beauty alone will only get you compared to Liv Tyler. As Juyon, she lends the film a sense of "everyman" (or everywoman) humanity and sadness. Dong-kun Jang, who plays Woo's partner Kim, is the least engaging of the main cast, but that's only because his character is the least engaging. He's there primarily to be Woo's sidekick, and although his character is given plenty to think and do, Kim never becomes as moving a figure as Woo or Juyon.

It's nice to see a movie with an older cast, something that a lot of filmmakers have forgotten about. Now, young folks are fine and all, but a fella like me can only take so many films about a guy in his early twenties who is supposed to be some seasoned FBI agent or hardened street cop. It's good to see some people with a couple lines in their faces amid this era of youth worship. No, it's not like we're watching Carl Olsen up there in action, but at least we're not expected to buy some fresh-faced lad of twenty as a grizzled veteran of the homicide department. Even Ji-woo Choi is close to thirty, which makes her positively ancient by Hollywood standards. Well, by all Hollywood standards except the one that allows Meg Ryan to still act like she's nineteen. Weird how in the 1980s, we had all these teens movies starring people in their thirties as teenagers. Now we have all these movies with supposedly older adult characters being played by people barely out of their teens. I fully expect to see a remake of Cocoon starring Aaron Carter, Mandy Moore, the members of O-Town, and in the role formerly occupied by Steve Guttenberg - Steve Guttenberg.

Not that we're entirely devoid of wrinkles here. Sean Connery still catches the eye, as does George Clooney. And that dreamy Robert Redford? He voted for Taft!

Lightening what would otherwise be a grim film is a truly wonderful and twisted dark sense of humor that keeps most of the proceedings feeling like something out of a cartoon. Amazingly, this doesn't really undercut the brutality or effectiveness of the film, which has enough serious moments to balance things out nicely. It's sort of like watching a Walter Hill film along the lines of 48 Hours, where there is plenty of dark comedy, but it is seamlessly blended with more sinister elements that result in a well-balanced film rather than something that veers wildly from one mood to the other without establishing anything. Sometimes the violence is used for humorous effect; sometimes it's deadly serious.

I'm a bit surprised that most critics and viewers are so dismissive of the plot as being non-existent. It's there, and it actually has quite a lot to say, even if it chooses not to do it through dialogue. Perhaps it's just me, and I'm seeing more than was ever meant to be there, but you know how it is. If I see it, then it's there, at least for me. That the movie has chosen to develop both plot and characters in a somewhat unconventional manner seems to get missed, or it simply doesn't work for some people. I thought it was delightful. Despite what you might think, I don't feel engrossed by movies that are nothing but visual flare and pointless action scenes. Though Nowhere to Hide is dripping with visual flare and action, never once did I feel it was the entire point of the film. Like I always say, you get out of a film what you put into it, and most people seem unwilling to look beyond the film's visuals and see anything more. Fine with me. I have no vested interested in convincing people that what they dismiss as nonsense is actually, at least to me, an interesting and subversive plot. In a world where movies have gotten so manipulative and so dumb, people hardly recognize something clever when it comes along. Rather than beat you over the head with it, director Lee Myung-Se allows his film to gather substance along the way, and apparently, it does with a subtlety lost on many viewers. I have no problem being in the minority in thinking that there is a hell of a lot more going on here than just cool visual tricks. The mov

ie even further subverts expectations by delivering violence that isn't particularly nice to look at. We expect well-choreographed shootout and fight scenes that play out like ballet. Nowhere to Hide gives us sloppy, awkward fist fights that look pretty much like fights do in real life. The movie isn't here to make violence look cool. In fact, it's often striving to make violence look absurd.

Ultimately, it's one of those movies you have to see for yourself and make up your mind about. Is it mindless fluff, violent nonsense, or an actual thoughtful and enjoyable piece of filmmaking? Is it all those things? I thought it was wonderful, but like I said in the opening paragraphs of this review, I'm often easy to please. It's the antithesis of movies by directors like John Woo, who of course, Lee Myung-Se gets compared to a lot by critics who don't know any other names in Asian cinema. Never mind that the movies and directors are nothing alike aside form the frequent use of slow motion. Nowhere to Hide lets you put your own notions into it, and if those notions are that this is all style and no substance, then that's what you'll see. I actually went in knowing very little about the film and director, and had no real preconceptions about what I was about to witness. I think that worked out well for me, because I ended up seeing quite a lot.

On top of that, I flat out enjoyed the film. It's unique in style and substance. It's expertly pieced together, beautiful and ferocious to behold. It's funny, twisted, gritty, and sad. Ten minutes were slashed from the American version of the film, which may be why people seem to miss so much of what's going on in it, so seek out the uncut 112 minute original Korean version. It's bombastic, it's flashy, it's innovative. It has something to say even if people seem not to hear it. But none of that matters much if it isn't an enjoyable film, and I thought Nowhere to Hide was simply fascinating. And hell, even if you think I'm full of it, at least the film is entertaining and cool to look at.