Dirty Ho

Fine Art Prince

Dirty Ho
aka Lan tou He
Hong Kong 1979
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Dirty Ho starts off with an opening credits sequence depicting the two main protagonists, Wang Tsun Hsin played by Gordon Liu and ‘Dirty’ Ho played by Yue Wong, fighting an abstract battle against many people against a white studio background, as the two fight side by side and protect themselves from hordes of combatants who mean them harm... serving as a metaphor for various action sequences much later in the movie. Unfortunately, it’s also scored with some excruciatingly inappropriate De Wolf library needle drop which, yeah, kind of put me off a little, it has to be said.

Then we get dropped into the story, as black market jewel trader Ho and upmarket, generally honest but ‘cunning and hiding something very important’ Wang, come into rivalry on a pleasure boat, as they each try to one up the other with the number of girls they can retain at their tables with various high value bribes. When it all ends badly for Ho and he is cheated out of his own ill gotten gains, he tracks down Wang but always seems to come a cropper of bad luck. Whether it’s a big fight with ‘The Handicapped Four’, all who turn out to be quite able bodied after all, in a parody sequence poking fun at Crippled Avengers (reviewed here) or one of many spectacular set pieces where Wang pretends he’s hired one of the escorts, Crimson, as his body guard, manipulating her arms and legs (and lute) as he pretends she is fighting Ho, coming out on top when s/he splits his forehead with a venom filled sword cut... it’s all quite fun stuff.

When Ho can’t find a cure for the big, ugly thing brewing on his head as a result of that fight, he eventually ends up becoming Wang’s disciple/slave so he receives a daily antidote which will eventually cure his condition. However, after a number of reveals, Ho slowly falls in with what’s going on and realises Wang is the eleventh of fourteen princes who is supposed to return to the palace at some point so the emperor can announce who will inherit his throne. The princes are trying to stop each other from being there, especially Wang, who does need to be there but is only really interested in living a life outside with fine art, good wine and the pursuit of martial arts. Ho falls in with him and, when Wang is wounded in one leg, allows Wang to train him and develop his kung fu skills so he can be a better bodyguard and help him return to the palace at the required time.

And it’s a fun film filled with elaborate set pieces. There are a couple of scenes where various people try to kill Wang in social situations without Wang or his opponent letting on that they know. What are best described as battles of social manners when, for instance, the tasting of eleven fine wines becomes a low key but no less spectacular acrobatic affair where wines are served and tasted by each as they dodge each other’s killing hands and feet, keeping up the pretence of a social situation. Similarly, there’s more of the same where the study of some fine art prints and scrolls turns into a battle against people wearing ‘Rosa Klebb’ style shoes with retracting blades (note to a regular reader... not blades retracting from George Lucas' butt though, okay?).

There’s also a great scene where, with Wang being wheeled through the land by Ho on a pushcart, the two manage to survive an attack by a battalion (including many archers) in a long action scene not unlike the kind you would get in the Lone Wolf And Cub movies (which I need to revisit again on Blu Ray real soon, I think). There’s also the inevitable training sequence with a ‘revert to type’ set of scenes where Ho is taught how to improve his kung fu skills by kicking targets while balancing little candles in small bowls on his shoulders, burning himself with wax whenever he gets something wrong to train his body. So yeah, while the film does kinda poke fun, tongue-in-cheek style, at some of the conventions of the genre up until this point, it also uses those very conventions and genre tropes to do it... which I guess would make sense.

Once again, just like in Heroes Of The East (reviewed here) and a few others, the director allows the moving camera to get right into the action with the cast, making for a dynamic series of combat sequences (not to mention lengthy ones), which pull you into the centre of things and, well, it’s an alternate way of doing it and I guess it does allow you to cheat a little in terms of breaking the fight down into shorter sequences rather than pull back and do longer takes from a static shot set up, but the technique works well and the skill and expertise of the performers... all of whom perhaps belong in a circus, as is the nature of the characters in these films... is such that you certainly don’t think any less of the brilliant fight choreography and the enthusiasm with which it is brought to life.

And that’s me done with both Dirty Ho, another of these movies I would gladly recommend but, also, with Arrow’s ShawScope Volume 1 Blu Ray set, of which this is the twelfth and final movie in the box, followed by two CD compilations of the soundtracks from six of them, all of them needle drop tracks from the De Wolff music library. However, if you are liking some of my Shaw Brothers movie reviews, fear not, I still have a few stand alone titles to watch and there’s also a second Shaw Scope volume being released* of these fairly soon (and which will surely have been released by the time this review makes it onto this blog so, yeah, more to come soon, I would say).

*Actually, since writing the first draft of this review a year or more ago, I have the second Shawscope set and four additional Shout Factory Shaw Brothers Classics box sets to watch and review too (so somewhere around 60 moives) plus, as of a couple of weeks ago, the announcement of ShawScope Vol 3 on the horizon. So, yeah, although there may not be as many Shaw Brothers reviews on here in the next month or so, there will be a fair few Golden Harvest reviews coming too (if you like early MIchelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock movies, keep an eye out) and, you can rest assured, the Shaw Brothers will certainly be returning to this blog at some point in the near future... at least that's the plan.

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.

King Boxer/5 Fingers of Death

Chao Handy

King Boxer
aka Five Fingers of Death
aka Tian xia di yi quan
Hong Kong 1972
Directed by Chang-hwa Jeong
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, full confession time. I’ve not seen that many Shaw Brothers movies over the years. Literally... probably less than 25 I would guess. So Arrow’s Blu Ray set, ShawScope Volume 1, was definitely something I wanted to check out, containing 12 Shaw Brothers classics (10 of which I don’t think I’ve seen). What I also didn’t know was that this first film in the set, King Boxer, starring Lieh Lo as the main, put upon protagonist Chao, is actually the film more commonly known in Western circles as Five Fingers Of Death and, honestly, that seems to be a better fit for a title since, as far as I could make out, there’s no actual boxing in this movie.

The plot is simply the old feuding Martial Arts schools entering a fighting competition, with one villanous school breaking all the rules, killing lots of people and generally trying to take out the potential champions of their rival before the event goes ahead... so they can proclaim their martial arts skills the greatest in the region. Chao is one such student at the school, who has a proper fleshed out background and he’s not alone in this, rather impressive slice of Shaw Brothers action cinema. There are a whole bunch of main protagonists and antagonists, each explored and built up in their own right. We even have a somewhat traitorous ‘good guy’ and a turncoat ‘bad guy feels ashamed and helps the hero’ also thrown into the mix, to add to the complexity of the story. Not to mention two women who both have eyes for Lo’s often miserable and angry looking Chao. Fighting, treachery, training montages and enthusiastic name calling ensues, with bloody consequences to both sides as the film progresses.

Asides from that, though, it also popped me right out of my seat when the opening credits used the music from old TV show Ironside needle-dropped into it. Now wait a minute, I thought to myself, is this where Tarantino nicked the idea of having his heroine Beatrix, in Kill Bill, hear the opening siren call of the Ironside theme every time she got worked up to go into battle, from? Sure enough, once our hero is handed down the Iron Fist Technique Manual from the sensei who is training him and mastered the moves for himself, the Ironside sirens play and he gets to be even more moodier looking than his usual expressions of either shame, anger or intense concentration. So, yeah, it’s no secret that Tarantino is, to put it politely, post modernistic in his storytelling.

Actually, I was brought to attention by the soundtrack quite a lot as there is a lot of needle dropped music in it. For instance, there are at least two cues from John Barry’s Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here) in this and, also, a couple of instances of very short snippets from his Thunderball score too, if I’m not much mistaken (reviewed here). And later, in a few scenes but especially when one of Chao’s ‘waiting women’ is daydreaming and literally imagining the two of them running into each other's arms in an open field (no, really!), we get some of Piccioni’s score from Camille 2000 (reviewed here) suddenly dropped into the audio mix... which makes for quite an unintentionally hilariously moment I can tell you.

And it’s a sleek looking product reflecting Shaw Brothers budgets, I imagine. I saw eight kung fu films made in Taiwan shortly before I watched this one and the Shaw Brothers certainly win out in terms of the productions values and also story coherence I would say. That being said, I thought the Joseph Kuo films I saw in Eureka Masters Of Cinema’s Cinematic Vengeance set had a lot more energy and spectacle in their various fight scenes. Everything looked a lot more rigorous and enthusiastic, it seems to me.

That being said, the fights in this are not to be sneezed at either. They certainly seem better edited and, while they don’t show the various combatants reacting to their injuries as much during the fights, the Shaw Brothers have also amped up the goriness factor. There’s a scene for instance, where the traitorous good guy is punished for failure by a bad guy in a fight when, with both opponents in mid air, the bad guy plucks the other's eyes out. All during the film we’ve seen him playing with a couple of metal balls in his hands like Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny and it’s at this point, as the villain opens one of his hands to reveal the other guy's eyeballs before dropping them to the floor, one realises the whole idiosyncracy of the character was foreshadowing this moment. In a later scene, before getting killed himself, the victim goes all Zatoichi and, turning the lights out on the man who deprived him of his sight, pulls out the other guy's eyeballs when he can’t see him. There certainly isn’t a dry eye in the house at this point, I can tell you.

Perhaps my favourite thing about the movie though, accompanied by that Pavlovian use of the Ironside theme to build audience anticipation of the fact that someone’s going to get a good kicking, is the heroe's pair of... um... well his ten fingers of death. At one point in the movie, fearing his deadly hands, the villains tie him to a tree and destroy his hands with sticks, smashing them to smithereens and he is seen, as in the aftermath of the ‘horses on hands’ scene in the very first Django movie, to be contemplating his ruined fingers just like Franco Nero did in the aforementioned spaghetti western. However, just like Nero and every other hero who ever took a beating before the final reel of a picture, he regains the power of his hands, toughens them up again and once more uses them as lethal weapons. And it’s at this point that, whenever the sirens go off in his head, his palms glow an eerie red, their deathly powers shining like an aura of blood before he clenches his fists and bashes the bad guys up.

Arrow’s Blu Ray, which looks like it’s been ported over from a Celestial Pictures transfer (I used to buy the old Region 3 Celestial Pictures DVDs from places like Soho back in the day), is absolutely brilliant apart from in one fight scene where the quality suddenly drops sharply... but I suspect that’s more to do with the original footage on the negative rather than a transfer issue. There are also a wealth of extras including the first of a three part documentary (which I assume will be continued on other discs in this set) which explores Kung Fu cinema and also its later influence on Hollywood. So, yeah, King Boxer aka Five Fingers Of Death, is a vastly entertaining movie and I’d certainly recommend this one to afficionados of martial arts movies, for sure.