Kung-Fu Cinema: gaining momentum

A little while back I decided that I wanted to get into kung-fu movies.  Straightforward enough...yet deceptively complicated, because damn there are a lot of them, released under numerous aliases and with various crappy original language and dub audio tracks.  I started here, an article I found very helpful as a primer...the legend continues, as they say. Keep in mind that I'm speaking about these films from a perspective of almost no prior knowledge and experience.  So far I'm just working with what Netflix has available...

First up, 1978's Drunken Master with Jackie Chan.  Being such a novice, only Jackie Chan's later work in American action films (read: Rush Hour series) was familiar to me.  This movie was one of his first films, and was basically my first introduction to his body of work as a martial artist. Jackie Chan is the "Harlem Globetrotters" of Kung-fu.  There's a sizable element of slapstick comedy in this movie, present in almost every fight or training sequence.  Much less serious than the previous films I watched...but in a very satisfying way.  Jackie is an almost freakishly talented acrobat, and there was a lot of really nice fighting choreography in this film. 

The story follows a young rapscallion (Jackie Chan) who displeases his father so much that dad hires a legendary bad-ass oldman (who loves to booze) to train the shit out of sonny for a year. Son is reluctant at first, hates training, etc...then eventually comes around. The B story has this villain named ThunderLeg (with some killer 'Vince Noir' hair and a 'stache worthy of its own melon stand) who enters the picture and kicks a bunch of ass.

Drunken Master was a lot of fun to watch.  I would definitely recommend it.  It's sort of long, but it's got quite a lot of cool hand-to-hand fighting with an element of sillyness that I dug and they touch on a bunch of different fighting styles (drunken style, obviously, or stuff like monkey style and also this one style where a dude has a really hard skull and just rams people with it like Juggernaut) and it has a bunch of creative but comical training sequences. I looked around for a sweet clip of the movie, but the only decent one I could find was the final fight scene...and I figured you should have to work a bit to see that.

Iceberg Movie Rating = 46 out of 50 ways to leave your lover.  Extra points awarded for hilariously brutal training exercises.

Next up I watched Master of the Flying Guillotine. Netflix bills it as a favorite of Quentin Tarantino and "the most notorious weapon to ever appear on film".  The weapon being referred is pretty gnarly (see picture on the right). This old blind dude with some future classic eyebrows throws this "hat" on a chain at you and it hooks onto your skull. Then he gives it a Duncan tug and your dome done been shuck clean off the stalk, jellytoes.  Not exactly a guillotine, but you get the idea.  This movie reminded me a bit of Enter the Dragon as the premise in both movies is a big fighting tournament where a bunch of dudes from different lands come to compete.

The titular character is an assassin hunting down the "one-armed boxer" who took out his two proteges. My careful research tells me that this is actually a sequel to a 1971 film called The One-Armed Boxer, which sets the stage for this one and is also written, directed by, and starring Jimmy Wang Yu (aka the "one-armed boxer")

I feel like they were really stretching their wings with this one on the special effects front, from the numerous decapitations to guys with Dhalsim extendo-arms and on to dudes fighting each on top of a "forest" of upturned swords.

Check out the trailer:

This was a cool one...not as satisfying as Drunken Master or 36th Chamber, but worth watching for some of the odd weapons and fights.

Iceberg Movie Rating = 75 out of 99 red balloons

Coming Soon:

Kung-Fu Hustle

Legendary Weapons of China