Recommend Martial Arts Movies

how is Birth Of The Dragon? it's been on film4 recently.

Zu Warriors goes on the wishlist, i think.

Birth of the Dragon?
iirc that's the movie that's supposedly about Bruce Lee but makes it about some random white guy

Eureka just announced Mr Vampire. I've never liked it much (Encounters Of The Spooky Kind is superior) but I'm looking forward to the features.

Something else from Tony Rayns Zu commentary: he talks a bit about Mou Tun-fei, best known for the infamous Men Behind The Sun. Rayns says two of his earliest films are two of the nastiest sexploitation films, I think both were banned and his last film was never released (I think it was much like Men Behind The Sun). There's an interview/documentary about him on youtube.

How dare, I love Mr.Vampire! Honour the hopping vampires!

The hopping vampire in Encounters Of The Spooky Kind is superior, one of the best movie monsters ever.

I really gotta find a good copy of that

The sequel isn't as good but has some hilarious bits.

If I was a trillionaire I'd try to get Sammo to make a third film in the series.

I've heard that Mr Vampire 3 is quite good but most of the hopping corpse films are supposed to be total dross.

> Birth of the Dragon?
> iirc that's the movie that's supposedly about Bruce Lee but makes it about some random white guy

i see what you mean. i'd only seen the first 2 minutes and that was all subtitled, but 5 minutes in it's already all about the white guy and how the temple was against bruce lee because he was half-white, let alone teaching white guys.

Bride With The White Hair getting a Eureka bluray. It doesn't include the sequel (I've never heard that it's a step down). My Tartan dvd copy is shockingly bad for such a good label.

Someone from Eureka says there's hopefully going to be a Michelle Yeoh box set.

I had a fairly long list of Wu Tang Collection (youtube channel) films to watch but I ended up only watching one of them because most of them seem to have multiple problems. Older martial arts fans might say I'm a brat spoiled by the last 15 years of mostly reliably good disc versions (some of the earliest dvds are terrible) but I say why bother when there's a steady stream of remasters coming out?
The problems included bad picture quality, wrong aspect ratio, english dubbing and worst of all: screen cropping. Some fans actually seek out english dubs but wrong aspect ratios and screen cropping just destroy films.

The one that was scratchy but watchable was Crystal Fist/Jade Claw. It's not particularly distinct, I'm guessing the fights are the only reason anyone remembers it but I wouldn't really recommend it.

Kinda funny to see Eureka be the best label hands down in rereleasing Hong Kong cinema stuff but still sniffily witholding the Masters Of Cinema distinction even for releases directed by Tsui Hark or Jackie Chan when Criterion at this point has caved in and does a Bruce Lee boxset.

Drunken Master was in their Masters Of Cinema series, which is funny because it's really not one of his best films and as far as I know, Bruce Lee's films aren't often considered the best in the genre (apart from himself of course).

I think all the King Hu reissues have been in the Masters Of Cinema series and most of them fit comfortably enough in the genre.

I think it's wonderful that both Eureka and 88 Films are both sort of doing this together (much of the releases have the same reissue credits), but why has Arrow released so few martial arts films? They really ought to get in on it.

How did I miss this thread before now? Catnip!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaH_u3VlGjg

Great thread, btw, glad it's on my radar now.

Yeah they include King Hu but his stuff is more self-consciously "classy" than yer average Hong Kong actioner. All great stuff, don't get me wrong.

88 Films sorely lacking in extras featuring Nicky Wire in a banana suit.

King Hu is definitely more refined but I never thought there was anything self-conscious about it. And I never felt that the Chinese arthouse directors who do martial arts stuff needed to distance themselves and they always use the same actors that everyone else does. King Hu was an architect of the genre in the early days when the language was being properly established so I'm not sure it would occur to him to want to psychological distance himself from Chang Cheh or whoever else.

Kinda disagree on that one, at least A Touch of Zen feels like it's shooting for way higher than the average pic at the time. Of course, it's amazing, so who cares I guess

It has higher aspirations but I never saw any evidence that any of those kind of directors were pretending to be working in a wholly different tradition or that they hadn't seen the regular martial arts films. Touch Of Zen and Legend Of The Mountain have different priorities most of the time but Come Drink With Me and Fate Of Lee Khan are fairly straight forward.

I was surprised to find out that in italy, guys like Lucio Fulci could hang out with the arthouse directors.

But I did see Hsiao-Hsien Hou say that he thought super elaborate fights were annoying and that he wanted The Assassin to have a samurai film simplicity.

Comics writer Joshua Dysart made this list about Hong Kong cinema in general and I found the comments at the bottom really interesting discussion about the fate of the industry.
https://letterboxd.com/joshuadysart/list/the-annotated-story-of-hong-kong-cinema/detail/

Great list there! Very interesting.

Man, I'd love to see some of those Shaw Bros 'James Bond' knock offs, can't seem to find them after a surface search, need to dig deeper I guess.

Best awkward english title: A Punch To Revenge

Never even heard of this one, but I'm sure I'll buy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kku4szSBGx8

Aw, was hoping that would be a different "The Master", with Chen Kuan-Tai.

It does look fun though!

Holy Flame Of The Martial World - This barely ever stops moving, not easy to keep up with; quite similar to Buddha's Palm but slightly less overt fantasy (still wild). Features lots of magic beams, magic swords, reanimated imported corpses, warriors that come out of paintings, hand animated neon ghosts, a technique called "ghostly laughter" that maddens and blows opponents away (some people are able to defend themselves by rolling up their ears as if they had muscles to do so).
It's good fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke-9n2xcUiY

Agreed! was lucky enough to catch a screening of that a while back. very goofy

Do you see these things at festivals or is it just a local cinema that specializes?

I still need to see Demon Of The Lute, not sure how many more films are like this from this era.

A local cinema. iirc this was an unofficial screening, so I won't say which chain it was... you can guess.
I feel like there are tons of these kinds of weird magical fantasy-type action movies in the early 80s that are largely forgotten. At least John Carpenter noticed them at the time!

I hear that Taiwan did quite a lot of them. Films like Ginseng King, Magic Of The Universe and the Child Of Peach trilogy are starting to mix in my memory a bit.

https://letterboxd.com/ninjadomoesq/list/weird-and-wonderful-cinema-from-the-far-east/

Cynthia Rothrock’s early 90’s DTV action films are always worth a good laugh

Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995) is probably my favourite Hong Kong martial arts film ever. Staggeringly beautiful

It's quite weird too. I wonder if if Hark's career would have been different if it had succeeded, because I've heard he was heartbroken that it flopped.

I feel like there are tons of these kinds of weird magical fantasy-type action movies in the early 80s that are largely forgotten. At least John Carpenter noticed them at the time!

Did Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain start this trend, or is it just that that's the one most western fans saw and so ppl just assume?

Buddha's Palm came out the previous year but ZWFTMM feels a lot more modern and its dna carried on more. There's supposed to be lots of chinese fantasy films in the 40s or 50s that inspired ZWFTMM, but I'm sure they were very different. I've never seen a trace of them, I guess a lot of this stuff is lost?

The BFI did a Chinese Cinema retro some years ago and I was v pleasantly surprised to see a 30's Wong Fei-hung film in there (didn't actually see it tho - turned up on the wrong day!), so while I'm sure lots of it will be lost I also wouldn't discard the possibility that some of it isn't - whether anyone will ever reissue it in the West is a different matter...

Clan Of The White Lotus - Lo Lieh directs and plays the villain; the highlights for me were seeing Gordon Liu's tiger style, his collaborative fighting and Kara Wai teaching him how to fight like a woman (part of this includes sewing and looking after her baby); love it when they bend over backwards and swirl their arms.

Yeah, that's a great one. It's sorta a remake of Executioners from Shaolin with Chen Kuan-tai, and has Gordon Liu in it for like five minutes, which is also good

This was pretty interesting, lot's of suggestions and info to unpack.

https://purecinemapodcast.libsyn.com/kung-fu-cinema-with-quentin-tarantino

Operation Condor (extended cut) - I saw the regular cut of this many years ago and don't remember the half of it (the extra scenes don't even explain how much seemed new to me). I think it's one of Jackie Chan's most impressive films in many ways but both versions drag a bit, epsecially the desert scenes. The 3 women take quite a beating and there's a lot of stereotypes but most of the first half and the fan scenes at the end are really good.

Pretty sure I caught that in theaters, six years after the original release when it finally came to the US via Miramax (maybe). It was just OK, I remember, but def not as good as Supercop.

...holy crap, that was the woman from Matador?

Heart Of Dragon - Sammo Hung directs and in an interview he joked that maybe Rain Man was a ripoff of this film. Cop (Jackie Chan) looks after his mentally disabled brother (Sammo Hung) who keeps getting into trouble. For a touching family drama, the body count is pretty high, lots of criminals are straight up murdered.
I watched the extended version, there was a lot of soundtrack options and the Japanese music was the default version. It's by Kazuo Shiina (Moonriders), so it's a bit new wavey and Chan does some singing on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcS41yNaDR4

I really liked it. Lots of Jackie's team gets to shine.

It was called First Mission in Japan, can't find the full soundtrack on youtube
https://www.discogs.com/Kazuo-Shiina-Jackie-Chan-The-First-Mission-Original-Soundtrack/master/1486382

For a touching family drama, the body count is pretty high, lots of criminals are straight up murdered.

lol

Oddly it might be just as violent as The Protector and Crime Story but with a different tone.

I take the insane tonal shifts in stuff like Heart Of The Dragon as an integral part of the greatness of Hong Kong cinema but the same thing still registers as a flaw when I'm watching a Hollywood film. Perhaps I should work at trying to remedy that.

Never much bothered me in hong kong films as it does in a lots of japanese cartoons/videogames where you're expected to shift from silly to super-super-serious in much more jarring ways I think.