Shaolin Mantis

The Man
From A Mantis

Shaolin Mantis
aka Tang lang
Hong Kong 1978
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some mantis-like spoilers in this one.

Wow. This is an extremely entertaining Shaw Brothers martial arts movie, for sure (and for Shaw, I guess). The film stars screen legend David Chiang as Wei Fung, who becomes the Shaolin Mantis of the title. More on that later but, a quick summation of the style of the film is as follows...

A lame fight with freeze frame credits is followed by a scene where Wei Fung has to demonstrate and prove his kung fu skills to his emperor by defeating two of the emperor’s champions, the second being a cameo guest appearance by Chia-Hui Liu, who is perhaps best known to many westerners as Gordon Liu, from his appearance as two different characters in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. After he proves his mettle, Fung is sent out to spy on the clan of a region where the emperor suspects there is rebellion brewing and gain proof of such, with time deadlines devoted to punishments meted out on his family if he fails to return from his mission (ultimately ending as death for all as the final incentive).

So off Weng goes and he meets a good looking, young, insolent brat of a woman named Tien Chi-Chi, played by Cecilia Wong. She is in the process of throwing out her 18th personal tutor in, probably, as many months and, somehow, she takes a shine to Wei Fung and gives him a job as her new teacher. Luckily for him, this takes him into the household where the rebellion just happens to be brewing. When the elder uncle finds out he is a spy, he is going to kill the new teacher but, unbeknownst to Wei, the daughter tells him they are to be married and promises that he’ll stay in the compound. And so they do marry, with Wei none the wiser about what has happened. But soon he needs to go back to ensure his parents are safe and his situation is clarified for him in no uncertain terms. So he and his wife decide to break out but, first they must fight five fights with skilled kung fu experts, including the girl’s mother and auntie, to be able to leave. With tragic circumstances but, Wei escapes with his life (he’s the only one at this point... as his wife, the mother and aunt, all die either in these sequences or as a result of what happens).

Now then, while stumbling in the wilderness at his lowest point, a praying mantis attaches itself to Wei’s hand and won’t let go. He eventually gets it off him but then observes the mantis, along with assorted mantis friends... and realises the skill of the mantis staying attached to his hand comes from the insect’s martial arts mindset. An extended training montage plays out where he observes and emulates the moves and stance of the mantis, as he perfects a new mantis style of kung fu, giving himself maniacal mantised-up martial arts powers in order to beat the styles of the various guardians of his dead wife’s clan with something more formidable. And so he returns to fight his away back into the compound, bringing his mantis mayhem with him.

Eventually he returns to free his family from prison but, there’s a nasty twist at the end as to where his true allegiances lay... which I have to say I saw coming from the first five minutes of the film, to be honest (he’s way too reluctant a hero and obviously doesn’t want to go on the mission in the first place). It’s one of those endings where pretty much anyone you were rooting for dies and the only winner in this is the established emperor.

But the film packs a punch. I’m pretty sure the fighting on the credits and the opening two fight scenes where the hero has to prove his worth are only there because the next half an hour are pretty much just long, drawn out character development stuff... until the last hour of the film is pretty much one fight scene after another. So, if I were to sum the movie up it’s as follows...

Credits fights... two ‘prove your skills’ fights... long, slow but still entertaining scenes where characters and their relationships are built, followed by... fight, bigger fight, slightly bigger fight, even bigger fight and then biggest fight ending in tragedy and escape... followed by a silly but enthralling mantis kung fu training session... followed by a fight, a bigger fight, an even bigger fight and then, just for good measure, a really big fight. Followed by the ending which, almost but not quite... involves a fight.

But, honestly, I found the whole thing thoroughly riveting. I mean, this spectacular fight choreography looks more like a ballet so, I don’t know, maybe it’s the testosterone infused equivalent of dance but, whatever, it’s great to watch and, all in all, I had a great time with Shaolin Mantis. The swords and other weapons looked, maybe a little too shiny (like lacquered plastic accessories you’d get on early 1970s Playmobil figures) but David Chiang is as brilliant as always, as are the majority of the cast and I’m really pleased I blind bought this one last year (after the company posted a video of one of the fights on twitter). It’s good stuff and, well, I  have another fifty or so Shaw Brothers martial arts films still to watch and waiting in the wings so, I’ll get to those sometime soon, I guess.

Heroes Of The East

Hitty Woman

Heroes Of The East
aka Zhong hua zhang fu
Hong Kong 1978
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so the eleventh movie presented in Arrow’s Blu Ray ShawScope Vol 1 collection is Heroes Of The East and, it’s another entertaining yarn. That being said, I’m amazed that Shaw Brothers got away with releasing this one after the racist tone of the movie... I was going to say subtext but it’s way less subtle than that.

Okay, so it’s one of those films which introduces characters with credits from the moment they enter the story. I think I’ve only ever seen this practice done on Shaw Brothers movies and there are a lot in this box set which do this... once the titles are finished, they still just keep coming and coming until every new character has turned up throughout the course of the picture.

The film stars a young Gordon Liu as Ho Tao but, it’s a younger version of the actor in a way I’ve never seen him before... with a full head of almost Beatles-style mop top hair. After some shenanigans where he pretends to get ill rather than go through with an arranged marriage to a childhood companion, he drops all pretence of illness when he discovers she’s not the ugly battle axe he was expecting to have to marry. Far from it and, in the first of many credits in the movie which introduce actors and actresses with their specialist martial arts skills status, she is billed here as Japanese Seikendo Expert - Yuka Mizuno (who is here playing said new wife Yumiko).

Yup, it’s a ‘Chinese man marrying a Japanese woman‘ battle of the sexes comedy, for a while, with the extremely proficient new lady of the house pitching her belief in her own, ‘failing in the face of her husbands more elegant Chinese kung fu styles’ Japanese techniques, in which the battle is initially raised. So, yeah, it's a case of marital arts to martial arts, I guess.

However, it doesn’t take long to figure out for even the most IQ light viewer (so that’d be me then), it’s really about pushing the agenda that Chinese martial arts are far superior to Japanese brands and styles. This gets further pronounced in their domestic disputes to the point when, unable to take her techniques’ failures any more, she high tails it back to Japan.

So Ho sends her a letter challenging her to use her seven different kung fu styles against his in a battle to settle the dispute once and for all. However, her martial arts instructor (who also wants her for himself), shows his grandmaster the letter and seven of the masters in their special techniques (including him), plus the grandmaster as an observer, go to China to accept the challenge in her place, in seven duels.

From here on in, the film becomes a series of seven long fight scenes which, yeah, is all very watchable, fast paced and I dread to think how many times these various actors got hurt doing these sequences. So there are seven different skills and styles poor Ho has to go against... Swords, Karate (which Ho manages to defeat by somehow learning Drunken Kung Fu overnight), Nunchucks, Spears  (no match for Ho’s pole fighting technique), Sai (which is, yeah, the plural of Sai, as it turns out), a huge Judo guy who is defeated by Ho smearing his body with oil and, eventually, the Ninjitsu style as Yumilo’s affronted ex-master uses the most sneaky and deviously underhanded techniques to win his confrontation... losing out to the same techniques pitched against him.

So, yeah, there’s a sense of honour among the Japanese characters and they’re not presented as total idiots but, it’s very much, despite Ho’s attempt at a speech to help the Japanese regain face at the end, a movie saying ‘Chinese are better than Japanese’, live with it. So I’m surprised I’ve not been aware of any backlash against the film, which I’m sure it must have had.

It’s nicely put together too and the fight choreography is never boring. Indeed, rather than remain static and follow the action from afar, the director gets the camera right in with the actors, using camera motion to follow the fights around with a certain dynamism and kinetic appeal which, due to some good editing and clarity of where you are in a fight at any time, never gets at all confusing.

There’s some nice little moments in the fighting as well... such as the sense of honour of the characters. For instance, when Ho is using some kind of big choppy blades against his opponents sai, he disarms one sai from the other but then presents it back to him. The Japanese guy promptly sheaths it as it would be dishonourable to carry on using the weapon as it’s already been disarmed. In response, Ho beds one of his own weapons in a wooden support so they can carry on meeting each other on equal terms.

There are also some other things which add to the entertainment value... such as when the Ninja guy uses what he calls his Japanese Crab Fist technique, which really does have him energetically scuttling sideways here and there in stark resemblance to its crustacean origins. If that sounds a little silly... I can assure you it looks way more hilarious and ridiculous than it sounds and, I was almost sorry when Ho used his special Chinese Crane Fist technique to put a stop to his opponents sideways stratagems.

So yeah, Heroes Of The East is a bit of an unusual movie, starting off as a kind of Chinese/Japanese version of a Rock Hudson/Doris Day kind of comedy (with lethal weapons) but then turning into something far more serious, with the honour of Chinese martial arts resting on the energy and enthusiasm of the husband as he tries to somehow win back his wife by, I don’t know, reiterating in a more grander, large scale way what he tried to demonstrate to her in the first place. It’s a freeze frame ending so, yeah, we don’t know if this did the trick or not but, certainly that wouldn’t want to be a conversation I’d like to go back to if I was the male in this particular relationship.

And that’s me done on this one, I think. Despite its racist leanings I found the film to be thoroughly entertaining and didn’t mind the lopsided nature of the story as the comedy turned into something more serious and kinetic. Another good one in this set from Arrow.

Challenge Of The Masters

One Kick Pony

Challenge Of The Masters
aka Liu A-Cai yu Huang Fei-Hong
Hong Kong 1976
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so the sixth entry in the wonderful Arrow Blu Ray box set ShawScope Volume One is Challenge Of The Masters and it’s a pretty good, fairly simple movie. It starts off with a quite striking opening title sequence with Kuan Tai Chen as Master Lu Ah Tsai and a young Chia-Hui Liu (aka Gordon Liu) as the teenaged version of famous Chinese martial artist Huang Fei Hung... going through various training routines on a white background with each other. Liu’s various poses of energetic kung fu are used as movements to herald in the on-screen credits as the two dance around against big Chinese letter forms, the meaning of which are sadly untranslated on the subtitles... perhaps they make up the title of the movie.

Gordon Liu, of course, has had a very long career and, to the person on the street in the Western world he would perhaps be best known (though not by name, I suspect) as the person who played both Johnny Mo, the bald headed leader of The Crazy 88 in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume One and Pai Mei in Kill Bill Volume Two (a character he’d fought against a few times, I believe, in various films over the years). The person he’s playing here, Huang Fei Hung, in a film which starts off at the Pai Competition in the Year Of The Wood Rat, before he learned martial arts (that’s what this story is about) has possibly been played on film more than any other character. Indeed, Kwan Tak-hing apparently played him at least 77 times in the years between 1949 and 1981. Even some of the music needle dropped into this Shaw Brothers production is a theme associated with the character from some of these films and it was apparently written into the score of one of Jet Li’s versions of the character in Once Upon A Time In China (which I guess I need to grab hold of and watch at some point now).

The film itself is, as I said, very simple in its plot. It revolves around a martial arts competition where people scrabble for Pai’s (which  in this film take the form of a bunch of scrolls) fired out from fireworks and whoever’s team take one or more home, shows that they are good at martial arts (if I’m understanding this rugger scrum of a tournament correctly). Hung’s dad will not teach him martial arts but, after he accidentally causes one of his fellow pupils to be injured ,saving him from a villanous kung fu school who pick fights with them and don’t want them to have any Pai’s, his father’s former master, Lu Ah Tsai, takes him on and trains him up for a couple of years. 

Meanwhile, another friend of the family, a police officer who has come to the town to find a murderous thief, finds said thief being sheltered by the rival gang. The thief is a master of the ‘sharp kick’ deadly kung fu technique and, with the assistance of his lethal, metal toe caps, he kung fu kicks the officer to death. Thus more motivation is built for Hung to finish his training so he can take on the villain (who is played here by the film’s director Chia-Liang Liu) and then compete for Pai’s in the next tournament. All goes to plan and things play out the way you would expect them to, with Hung mastering the fighting arts but also the arts of diplomacy and compassion, to end up with the two fighting schools reaching a peaceful co-existence together.

And, yeah, it’s the usual thing of watching human dynamo’s leaping, punching and kicking on screen at a fairly fast pace and its all good fun. Interestingly, the master teaches Hung using the style of The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (which is another film I need to get hold of at some point), with the old ‘tracing a circle around increasingly diminishing sizes of easily breakable China to develop the reflexes’ ploy and, at one point, uses one of the Wooden Men of Shaolin Alley fighting pole swinging machines, which he names as such as coming from the Shaolin Temple (indeed, this is presumably one of the same props from the 1976 film Shaolin Temple from Shaw Brothers, reviewed by me here).

As usual, asides from the obvious needle drop issues, the film has fairly high production values and the quick shooting schedules and restraints are not in evidence in the film on a visual level for the audience to notice... it looks great. Of interest to me was the fact that one of the characters uses a transparent Sesame Seed oil to make himself slippery in a bid to be able to squelch out from the grasp of his opponents in the Pai contest. I can only assume that this may be the origin/inspiration behind the oiled up fight featuring Jason Statham in the first of The Transporter movies.

So yeah, Challenge Of The Masters is pretty much business as usual for the Shaw Brothers in that it’s a tightly paced mix of kung fu action, humbling training exercises and Eastern philosophy leading to forgiveness and peace over violence. In other words, an entertaining production which is nicely put together. Another winner in my book.