Thursday, August 13, 2009

Kung-Fu Cinema: one man's quest for knowledge



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.

As per the "Gateways to Geekery" article above, the first movie I watched was The 36th Chamber of Shaolin with Gordon Liu. I had gotten myself pretty immersed in Wu-Tang Clan's 36 Chambers album last year (hip hop still presents an almost wholly undiscovered frontier of music for me, and this is the very first hip hop album I embraced fully). The Wu is obsessed with kung-fu movies, and they sample them all over their record (as well as discuss them in "sketches" and name their group/album/selves after them).

36th Chamber of Shaolin was truly awesome. I would recommend this flick to anyone who's even vaguely interested in action sequences, training sequences, or film-making generally. I was quite taken with it right away (as my first movie of the genre) but also can now look back after having watched 5 or 6 and definitively say it is a quality piece of work. You can get that shit on Netflix so do it. In quick summary, it's set in 12th century(ish) China and everything is pretty fucked in Gordon Liu's little village so he hightails it outa there and winds up learning kung-fu from the monks of Shaolin on top of a mountain. Awesome line early in film, upon realizing that some jerk-face badasses are brutalizing their little town, one of Gordon's friends says "I wish we had learned kung-fu instead of studying calligraphy". Nice foreshadowing.

Something like half the movie is him training through the 35 chambers (training sequences of great variety and increasing difficulty). It also has that really sweet martial arts-movie theme of doing a bunch of training stuff that doesn't seem to have any direct connection to fighting...like when Danielsan gets all huffy about sanding the deck and Miyagi's like, "i've been training you all along, son: recognize" and then starts punching him. Eventually, Gordon invents and masters the three-section staff and creates the 36th chamber (the goal of which is to train the populace in the ways of kung-fu)..seriously boss hog. A must see.

Here's some Wu-Tang to get you in the mood:

"Shame on a Nigga"








Movie Rating = 36 out of 35 Chambers of Shaolin


Next up I watched the 5 Deadly Venoms. Kill Bill owes a pretty clear debt to this one about a "sick-ass clique" of 5 fighters who train in five different styles (centipede, snake, scorpion, lizard, and toad) and call themselves the "Poison Clan". Thing is some are bad and some are good, and they all trained with masks on all the time so they don't know who's who out in the world.

I think the concept was pretty cool, and the finale 5 guy free-for-all fight scene is pretty good, but in general the film's execution is only so-so. This one's way more violent than 36 Chambers as well, there's use of an Iron Maiden at one point. Decent, but 36 Chambers set the bar pretty high...although extra points cause one of my favorite Wu tracks samples this movie's English dub ("Toad style is immensely strong and immune to nearly any weapon...when it's properly used, it's nearly invincible").

"The Mystery of Chessboxin'"








Movie Rating = 28 out of 40 ounces of malt liquor (extra points awarded for reminding me of Wu-Tang.)

Next installment of Kung-Fu Cinema:
Drunken Master
Master of the Flying Guillotine

2 comments:

  1. I put The 36th Chamber of Shaolin on the Netflix cue. It will be my very first kung-fu movie ever.

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  2. Nice-way to follow my advice. It's long but a lot of fun. Drunken Master (original, 70's version) was also pretty great...I will discuss that one next time.

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