China O' Brien

China In Your Hand

China O' Brien
Directed by Robert Clouse
USA/China/Hong Kong 1990 
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

I’m glad that Eureka Masters Of Cinema (and also, now, Vinegar Syndrome in the US) have put out a 4K transfer of the two China O’Brien films. They were produced by Fred Weintraub and directed by Robert Clouse, who were the winning team behind Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon (review coming soon) but these two were held over for two years after they were shot back in 1988. The two films were made... I’d say back to back but, incredibly, simultaneously and all mixed up, within a six week period of that year, which is perhaps why the fight scenes look a little less spectacular than the ones Cynthia Rothrock had been doing previously in her Hong Kong movies.  

But I remember these when they came out... through word of mouth. They were finally picked up for distribution in both England and the USA, like a lot of movies at the time, as straight to video releases... no theatrical window whatsoever. And I remember seeing posters for the two when they were each released, up on the inside windows of my local off-licence where one could rent the film in question. I never saw them myself but I remember friends and acquaintances talked them up quite a lot and they were apparently doing a very lucrative trade. In the UK, for instance, this movie was number two in the rental charts, topped only by Rainman. 

This was Rothrock’s transition from the Hong Kong action movies to the US market and, once they were released, it really paid off big for all concerned. It was co-produced by Golden Harvest, who were also trying to expand into the American market at the time. A third and fourth film were planned very quickly after the success of the first two but, by that point, Rothrock had signed on to do a movie based on The Executioner series of books, co-starring Sylvester Stallone (a project which, sadly, never materialised) and her contract was such that she wasn’t allowed to appear in any more Hong Kong financed movies anymore. But this gave her US career a very good, if slightly delayed, kick start and I believe she’s kept in very good shape and is still making movies to this day. In the interviews I’ve seen her in on various new releases of her old stuff, she does look pretty darn amazing for a woman in her late sixties, for sure (pretty much like a thirty year old, it seems to me). 

In this one she plays the titular character China O’ Brien, who trains cops in martial arts as a big city police officer. Alas, after she shoots a kid early on in the film (an evil kid about to kill another cop but, a teenager nonetheless), she hands in her badge and gun and heads to Beaver Creek in Utah, where her father is the local sheriff. Unfortunately, when she gets there, the whole town has been taken over by a bunch of drug runners/sex traffickers etc and they pretty much have the legal system (and everything else) in their pocket. Only her father is resisting the corruption in town but, because of this, it’s not long before he’s dead too and so China runs for the position of mayor, in an effort to clean up the town and take all the bad guys down.  

Aiding her in her fight for justice are her two martial arts main male leads. First up is Richard Norton, who played such a charismatic villain who fought Rothrock in Magic Crystal  (reviewed here). He plays here as a kind of subdued, romantic interest for China (because the producers weren’t really into the two leads getting romantic but it’s exactly the way they deliberately played it in their performance, rather than what was in the script) and he’s just really likeable. The other male lead is Keith Cooke as Dakota, a kind of revenge seeking, motorcycle riding, Tonto-like character... who first protects and then joins up with the other two, to help bring justice for the people of the town. 

And I say Tonto-like because, before more than about twenty minutes into the movie, I realised that this was pretty much a Western, just with kung-fu fighting replacing the guns and bows and arrows (although there is a bit of gun play in this one too). But, yeah, it’s got the stranger coming back to town to protect the people from the corrupt officials in power and it has its fair share of brawls and bar fights... it’s just a Western in another guise, sold to a generation who, by the late 80s/early 90s, were not going to be happy to watch a straight up film in that genre. 

And it works really well on that level, I have to say. It’s a fun movie, sure enough and the fights, while suffering for the lack of time to choreograph and shoot them (the Hong Kong productions would take as many weeks to shoot a fight scene as the director had time to shoot both whole movies here), have a certain energy to them and the video audiences in the US and the UK were not greatly familiar with this style of fighting at the time... especially coming from a female lead (and Rothrock certainly shines in this one... as do her co-stars). 

There are also some nice things going on with some of the cinematography on occasion too. Such as when, in an early scene in Beaver Creek, Rothrock gets into the drivers seat of her car in profile with another car parked up between the camera and her vehicle, facing the other way. The two diagonals of the side struts of the windscreen on each vehicle create a triangle on the right hand side of the shot, highlighting Rothrock’s head in this visual space formed by the crossing lines perfectly. So some very nice stuff going on in a film which doesn’t overtly cry out as being this well lensed... but is, nevertheless. 

Oh, and there’s a nice little joke which I assume was intentional, which made me smile a lot. In one fight scene, I think it’s the penultimate of the big fights in the film, China finds herself losing a fight and then Norton’s character yells “China!”... and throws her a bit of ‘china’ to hit her opponent over the head with. So, yeah, there are some nice touches and I can completely see why this was such a big hit on the video rental market at the time. 

And that’s me done on this one, I think. I had a very good time with China O’ Brien and I’m looking forward to watching the other film in this sequence, which is also included in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema release as a double bill in a nice slip case. This one’s not as good in terms of action as Rothrock’s earlier films but, yeah, good enough, I thought.