The B-Masters Cabal

Me and Benny Chan go back a ways, and our relationship has been stormy. Some of his directorial efforts, like Who Am I and Big Bullet, I really like. Others, like New Police Story and Gen Y Cops, I really dislike. So I guess I come out even enough that when Chan makes a new movie, I figure I might as well see it. Shaolin, Chan’s first stab at a big budget period epic, is in a way the ultimate Benny Chan film for me in that I really liked about half of it and really didn’t like about half of it. It’s a movie that seems specifically designed to highlight both his strengths and weaknesses as a director.

Karate Robo Zaborgar presented me with the sort of soul-searching conflict that often plagues those of us who worry about the higher philosophical questions in life. On the one hand, it was a presumably loving spoof of one of my favorite genres — the old “tokusatsu” superhero shows of the 1970s, with their karate cyborgs, fringed jeans, motorcycle helmets, random explosions in rock quarries, and theme songs dominated by jazzy trumpets. On the other hand, I watched a similar movie last year — Takashi Miike’s Yatterman — and still consider it one of the worst, most unenjoyable movies I’ve seen in the better part of a decade. My bottomless disdain for Yatterman comes despite the fact that I generally like Miike as a director. Karate Robo Zaborgar, by contrast, was directed by Noboru Iguchi, a director who has yet to make a movie I didn’t dislike. His stock in trade is slapstick splatter send-ups of popular Japanese genres, but done with such juvenile laziness and awkward, ill-realized timing that what should have been outrageous comes across merely as tedious.

I really should write a full review of Tsui Hark’s landmark Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, but until that happens, I wanted to pop in with a few random thoughts and reminiscences inspired by watching it this past weekend at the New York Asian Film Festival. The festival this year was honoring director-producer Tsui Hark, so the line-up was pretty heavy on Hark films — all of which I’d seen before, and all of which I would gladly have watched again.

Given its title, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal that, at the end of The Killing of Satan, Lando does indeed appear to kill Satan. This presumably means that he has vanquished evil from the Earth, which, if you’re a Catholic, I think means that people don’t even swear of masturbate anymore. Still, The Killing of Satan refuses to dwell on the ramifications of the act, instead going for the old Shaw Brothers freeze frame soon after the battle’s conclusion. Has Lando given Beelzebub the death punch once and for all? Or will The Beast return to again walk the Earth? Either way, with a guy like Lando around, we’re always just a “pew pew pew!” away from salvation.

The first ten minutes of Vahsi Kan are perhaps the purest and most potent distillation in existence of the Turkish action film as interpreted by exploitation kingpin Cetin Inanc. They are also ten of the seediest, sleaziest, most hilariously lascivious and violent ten minutes you’re likely to see this side of the opening montage from Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive. It’s made even sleazier by the fact that, due to a crackdown on nudity by Turkish film censors — who had previously tolerated a surprisingly vast amount of perversion and decadence in the 1970s — there’s no actual nudity on display. Somehow, the simple honesty of a bit of gratuitous nudity would have made the opening minutes of Vahsi Kan substantially less dirty.

It is after one of Kara Murat’s especially prolific episodes of Byzantine bashing that Nikol (Kenan Pars), the Emperor’s unscrupulous Commander-in-Chief, suggests that a village of Turkish civilians be massacred in retaliation. The Emperor, still hoping to effect a truce with the Turks, forbids this, so Nikol and his men just go ahead and do it anyway behind his back. Sadly, the village they choose is the one in which Kara Murat’s gray haired old mom lives, and what’s worse, she ends up being dispatched by Nikol himself, who takes as a prize a necklace that we have just seen Kara Murat give to her. Soon after, Kara Murat comes upon her lifeless body. Heartbroken, he nonetheless realizes that continuing the cycle of violence won’t accomplish anything constructive, and instead pledges to seek grief counseling and move on with his life as best he can. The end.

Oh, I’m totally kidding. Of course he vows to get revenge.

Look at all the promotional materials for The World Of Drunken Master and you’ll see the Drunken Master himself, Simon Yuen Siu-tien, all over them. The main selling point of the film is that Yuen, star of the original movie, is in it. And it’s true, he is, for exactly 1 minute and 14 seconds. Yes, we’re at the mercy of the Hong Kong movie hype machine here, something that managed to sell at least 10 times more ‘Bruce Lee’ movies after Bruce’s death than he ever appeared in while alive. So the only place you’ll see the elder Yuen as Beggar So in this film is during a short opening credits sequence, practicing his drunken boxing on a beach somewhere.