Kung Fu Films

posted by jeffdoge
August 16, 2022 11:22 PM

After excessively watching various amounts of old hong kong & taiwanese martial arts movies from the 70s & 80s my sincere belief is that these types of movies are a lost art.

Mindless action movies are a genre I thought I had zero interest in based on the American take on these movies but I gotta say Hong Kong just knows how to do it better. They cut out all the bullshit, have a convoluted plot? Fuck that, make the plot as barebones as possible so it doesn’t matter. Character development? Fuck, you don’t even need to make character traits beyond, this is guy is evil, this guy is good, this is the comic relief guy. I feel like the crew understood their audience better than any other genre, you came for really cool looking fights & whatever creativity they put into it. The idea of “so bad they’re good” is often applied to the more low budget types of these movies and I always thought that’s such an incorrect way of applying it. “So bad they’re good” has this idea of ironically enjoying it, you’re laughing at the movie instead of with it. These are movies that are considered “bad” for skipping on admittedly usually major elements of what makes good movies from character development, coherency & looking too low budget. But with a lot of schlocky martial arts movies you can really easily tell the director & crew’s intentions, they weren’t trying to make a big budget masterpiece or provocative arthouse stuff. A fairly famous cult classic martial arts movie is “The Master of Flying Guillotine” which Quentin Tarrinto has been open to name as a favorite of his. I’ve seen “so bad it’s good” applied to this movie and it just doesn’t make sense to me. This is an almost straightforward example of the creators wanting to make a creative wuxia with intentionally absurd elements. I love this movie for how it focuses on looking badass & nothing else (Wuxia is a blanket term for Chinese historical fiction with an emphasis on martial arts fighting with fantasy elements. The stereotype for these films is when the characters start flying via the usage of wires & trampolines). The main weapon is this hat on a rope which when above one’s head will cut it off & the villain has his own theme music that’s just slowed down Krautrock. If anything, this is how action movies should be made in the west, don’t try to impress with expensive effects or making it 3 hours long with deep plots, deliver something the audience has never seen before & cut the bullshit.

One movie I gotta highlight is Wolf Devil Woman or Wolfen Ninja, written, directed & starring Pearl Cheung Ling. All these movies had like 5 names because they’ll change the name for western marketing purposes. This is an adaptation of a famous taiwanese wuxia book apparently with a large amount of liberties taken and honestly makes wuxia seem really cool. My 100% sincere take is the flying stuff in wuxia is no more outrageous from suspensions from reality done for just about every other action movie from superhero powers or someone somehow surviving a crazy explosion; it looks cool & what’s the fucking harm of having it, the audience understands it’s not realistic. As for the movie itself it’s a complete mindfuck, action in it is edited in a way that gives you shellshock with frantic cuts during fights & showing you the same few frames like 4 times in a row for emphasis, the only time i’ve seen a martial arts movie use sci fi flying saucer type stock sound effects & everything just looks weirdly psychedelic. It’s a very cheap looking film but it has a lot of charm. The main character is a woman who was raised by wolves in the mountains and they just used a bunch of german shepherds as the wolves & her costume that’s supposed to be of wolf pelts I guess is just the head of a stuffed animal dog made into a hat. So much of this movie is batshit but it never feels like that was unintentional, this felt like a weird passion project.

The accessibility of these movies today, to watch them properly, is kinda sad. For the big movies like the likes of Bruce Lee & anything made by the Shaw Brothers, the biggest Hong Kong film company of the 70s, it’s fairly easy to find them remastered, in widescreen & in the original language tracks. For anything else, it’s basically fucked. I don’t hate the old kung fu movie dubs but clearly the stereotypical dubs change the tones. Once you see multiple old dubbed kung fu movies you notice there’s literally like 8 people max who were in charge of the voices & for some reason half of the voice actors are british or australian. When watching these dubs you just have to go with the flow instead of asking why would a chinese guy in the 1500s sound british or have very clearly age inappropriate voices, any children voices were dubbed by women talking normally & i’ve heard the same voice guy that sounded 60 voicing protagonists that are clearly like 35 years younger. I’ve seen some movies where the dubs honestly work, The Master of Flying Guillotine specifically has a dub that I never found jarring. My biggest gripe is there is the same one guy doing a whiny annoying voice voicing every single comic relief character in each movie; once you notice it he gets on your nerves more & more. If you want to watch many of the lesser known movies in widescreen & subbed, you’re kinda shit out of luck. Many of these movies are only available in vhs rips of dubs with pan & scan crops instead of widescreen. Subbed versions might even be worse if you look at the subbed movies offered by the Wu Tang Collection most of them are pan & scan vhs copies, the ends of the subs are literally cropped out to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio. This specifically makes me wonder how the fuck were people fine with that in the vhs era, unless you know chinese not being able to read all the subtitles is a pretty glaring issue for understanding the movie. Pan and scan to me is a crime against movies for obvious reasons, stuff meant to utilize the entire frame is impossible to show & in general, these versions are not how the director wanted it to be seen. It’s kinda sad to me that so many of these movies in their intended viewing formats are lost media.

An example of what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RMbx5Tp_i0

I honestly cannot find any information about this movie at all and idk if it looks entertaining enough to watch straight through but there is no way this is the proper way to see it. This doesn’t even look like a master copy; it's a rip of a degraded vhs tape stretched out to look fullscreen with the subtitles hard to read & cropped off. Have to admit the look of aged VHS tapes has its charm but in no way would I pay for an official dvd of this copy.