Will Sloan's Wonder Emporium

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Bruce Lee Unicorn Chan in Fist of Unicorn (aka The Unicorn Palm, aka Bruce Lee and I) (1973)

Puffy-faced martial artist/actor Unicorn Chan was a boyhood friend of Bruce Lee. They appeared together as child actors in a movie called The Birth of Mankind (1946). When Bruce Lee returned to Hong Kong after trying his luck in Hollywood in 1970, Unicorn apparently helped him get some some interviews with studio bigwigs. After Lee hit it big, he returned the favour by providing some martial arts choreography and promotion for Fist of Unicorn, Unicorn Chan’s bid at stardom. It was “the only film outside his own that Bruce Lee would action-direct and help promote,” claims the box for the really crappy Videoasia DVD I bought a few weeks ago. The cover has a huge picture of Bruce Lee snarling on the front, and the tagline “The Lost Classic.”

Fist of Unicorn casts Unicorn Chan as a wandering martial artist whose smooth moved impress a little bald kid. Unicorn soon runs afoul of the local gang (or maybe they’re not gangsters, maybe they’re palace guards, or rival martial artists, or something. The subtitles were really hard to read). Some fighting ensues, as well as some comedy, if memory serves. I’ve already forgotten most of this movie. What I can tell you is that Unicorn Chan is not the most charismatic fellow I have ever encountered in a movie. I mean, maybe he was a nice guy, and he clearly knew how to make the right friends, but meh. Also, what kind of a name is “Unicorn”?

Fist of Unicorn was released in the U.S. after Lee’s death as Bruce Lee and I (not to be confused with the other movie called Bruce Lee and I, starring Danny Lee). This version includes documentary footage of Lee and Unicorn choreography fights and laughing with each other. You can see some of that footage in the trailer above.  In either version, this movie is really dull and not very good, but it has a tangential relation to Bruce Lee, which automatically makes it good.

From left to right: Fist; Unicorn

Source

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Bruce Lee in The Big Boss (1971)

After a stint as Kato on TV’s The Green Hornet failed to lead to a Hollywood career, Bruce Lee headed back to Hong Kong (where he had starred in melodramas as a teen idol in the ’50s) and signed up with Golden Harvest. The first of only four kung-fu movies Lee completed before his death, The Big Boss begins with about an hour of fairly dreary and inept drama (Lee plays a factory worker who breaks his solemn vow to never fight when he discovers the “big boss” is smuggling drugs) before bringing on the fights. It’s hard to imagine now, but in a cinematic marketplace that was dominated by the Shaw Brothers’ brand of acrobatic swordplay, Lee’s brand of brutal streetfighting and general demeanor of intense badassery were quite revolutionary. The Big Boss became Hong Kong’s biggest domestic box office hit of all time - beating the previous record-holder, The Sound of Music (that’d be a great double-bill).

Here’s an article about Lee from around the time of The Big Boss. Source: “Words of the Dragon: Interviews, 1957-1973,” edited by John Little:

The Man With a Stomach Like a Brick Wall

By John Hardie (The Hong Kong Star, November 1971)

If you were to call Mr. Bruce Lee a pink - and for a self-confessed punk, why not? - he probably would turn the other cheek and smile. Admittedly, such a stringent insult applied to the average high-polished fool would enable the victim and his lawyer to retire happily on the proceeds.

But Bruce Lee, the first Oriental to make the Hollywood big time, can cop a fair amount of abuse. Yet touch this deceptively light man of 30 whose muscles ripple beneath a floral shirt and - POW! “I have a sure-fire temper, man,” he said in an accent to unmistakably American to be phoney. “I cannot bear anyone to touch me. Feel this,” he said, a finger gesturing towards his taut midriff. Dismissing the preceding statement, I moved with trepidation and thumped. I could have been hitting a brick wall.

Bruce Lee smiled, dropped to the floor and began a series of push-ups - on one finger! “Someone once asked me,” he said, “what I am going to do when I am 50 or 60. I replied, ‘Man, there ain’t going to be no 50 or 60-year-old that can push me around.”

How did this meanest fighter around keep fit? “Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I work on my legs,” he said. “Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday I work on my punch. On Wednesdays and Sundays, I have sparring sessions.”

How did he fancy himself in the ring against Cassius Clay? Said Mr. Lee: “If you put on a glove, you are dealing in rules. You must know the rules to survive. But in the street you have more tools in your favor - the kick, the throw, the punch.”

For a man who has trained three world karate champions, and Steve McQueen and other Hollywood toughs, that, for my money, was good enough. To those who may not have known Mr. Lee until Hollywood exploited his talent, you may care to know he was born in San Francisco, came to Hong Kong when he was three months old and returned to the U.S. in 1959 where he majored in philosophy at the University of Washington.

He studied Chinese boxing during his years in Hong Kong and it was this learning he put into effect at the Long Beach International Karate Championships in 1964 that won him a break in Hollywood. Spotted by 20th Century [Fox], he was cast in the television series ‘The Green Hornet,’ an ultimate failure, he admits, which ran only one season. But more roles followed. There were chances in ‘Ironside,’ ‘Batman’ and the widely acclaimed ‘Longstreet,’ starring James Franciscus. Now he finds himself a juicy ham in the middle of a sandwich as contract.

Back in Hong Kong to complete a film for Golden Harvest, he said: “I have seen a script for a TV series on Chinese martial art called ‘The Warrior.’* This is the thing I really want to do.” I said the contract should be something of a financial bonanza but here was a man equally as objective with words as muscles.

“My policy is that money is an indirect matter,” he said. “The direct matter is your ability or what you are going to do that counts. If that comes, the indirect things will follow. What I am trying to do is start a whole trend of martial art films in the U.S. To me, they are much more interesting than the gun-slinging sagas of the West. In the Westerns you are dealing solely with guns. Here we deal with everything. It is an expression of the human body.”

What did he think of the blood-thirsty Chinese movies? “You have to be careful,” said Mr. Lee, “of movies that have broadly an action kick. It does not matter, it seems, whether a Chinese movie has a central theme as long as there are so many feet of action. I don’t go for that and I have achieved mutual cooperation with Golden Harvest in the sense that we are going 50/50 - still with the main theme in mind.

What opportunities did he see for other Asian movie stars in Hollywood? “None for the next 10 years,” he said, and followed with a whirlwind attack on the “stars.” “A star is an illusions. Man, is that something that can screw you up. When the public calls you a star, you had better know that it’s only a game. Since 1969, I have been really willing this TV series to happen. At that time, I wanted all the indirect things - money, fame, the big opening nights. Now I have it, or am beginning to get it, the whole thing doesn’t seem important any more. I have found that doing a thing is more important. I am having fun doing it.”

Bruce Lee shook my hand. It crunched in his grip but it was good to meet a man with brains to match his brawn.

*[This show would evolve into Kung Fu, starring David Carradine]

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Tsui Hark’s Mad Mission Part III: Our Man from Bond Street (aka Aces Go Places III) (1984)

Before becoming the leading light of the 1980s Hong Kong New Wave, Tsui Hark directed a trio of violent, politically-charged provocations: the martial arts film The Buttefly Murders (1979), the cannibal comedy We’re Going to Eat You (1980), and the political drama Dangerous Encounters - First Kind (1980). When those films met with censorship and poor box office, Tsui changed course and headed into commercial territory with the goofy comedy All the Wrong Clues (1981) and the Spielberg-influenced fantasy Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983). From that point on, he became something of a Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong cinema, turning out a string of commercial hits as either director (Peking Opera Blues) or very hands-on producer (A Better Tomorrow, A Chinese Ghost Story). Purists lament that he traded politics for pyrotechnics, although his excellent kung-fu series Once Upon a Time in China gives an interesting nationalist spin to the Wong Fei-hung legend.

Here’s one that’s definitely not a serious political film: the third entry in a series of silly, silly spy comedies starring Samuel Hui, Karl Maka, and Sylvia Chang. Master thief Sam Hong Kong (Hui) is tricked by lookalikes of Queen Elizabeth II and James Bond (the latter played by an actor who does look quite a bit like Never Say Never Again-era Sean Connery) into stealing a diamond. What follows are a variety of shenanigans that don’t make any sense, including a classic sequence involving a bunch of thieves dressed up as Santa Claus. Slumming Bond veterans Richard “Jaws” Kiel and Harold “Oddjob” Sakata cash a cheque, as does Peter Graves.

Best enjoyed drunk.

Based on the evidence at my disposal, I am forced to conclude that Rumble in the Bronx was not, in fact, shot in the Bronx.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

John Woo’s The Killer (1989)

By general consensus one of the greatest action films of all time (and one of the most famous movies of the Hong Kong New Wave of the ’80s/early ’90s), The Killer is the definitive distillation of John Woo’s mid-period aesthetic: it has the passion of Greek tragedy filtered through the kitsch of Hollywood gangster pictures, rendered with the broad strokes of a comic book. Loyalty, compassion, brotherhood, honour… these are concepts that aren’t analyzed in Woo’s films so much as blown up to mythic proportions and fetishized. The plot: Chow Yun-Fat is the titular killer, an assassin whose stray bullet accidentally blinds innocent nightclub performer Sally Yeh during a hit. Overwhelmed by guilt, Chow befriends her without revealing his true identity and takes on one last assignment to pay for a vision operation. Alas, things go awry when Chow’s bosses betray him, and he forms an unlikely alliance with a disillusioned cop (Danny Lee). The two men develop a bond depicted in such an intensely emotional way that American critics have sometimes called it homoerotic (the heavy emotional charge is the only explanation for why the original American distributors advertised this as “An Action Comedy by John Woo”).

Woo’s macho, astonishingly bloody action scenes originated motifs that have been co-opted by god knows how many American filmmakers - the doves, the overcoats, the leaping-through-the-air-while-firing-two-guns-in-slow-motion, the two-man-standoff. A popular, perhaps apocryphal legend has it that when an American studio executive told Quentin Tarantino, “I suppose Woo can direct action scenes,” Tarantino replied, “Sure, and Michelangelo can paint ceilings.” Woo himself often seemed like a watered-down Woo impersonator during his American period, when he directed such middling efforts as Hard Target, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible 2. Here, incidentally, is what Uncyclopedia has to say about his action scenes:

John Woo is known for John Woo’s sexy, orgasm inducing, eyeball popping, gut wrenching, gall bladder spraining, DVD+/-R burning, style oozing, akimbo fucking awesome action scenes. Jesus Christ was once quoted as saying(while frothing at the mouth), “Oh my shit’s fuck, that was an awesome action scene,” after watching a John Woo action scene. John Woo’s action scenes are so good, he has patented film action scenes, and trademarked the phrase “Action Scene.” Apple once took John Woo to court after trying to name their latest OS “Action Scene,” but was defeated in the most incredibly stylish court battle ever. The trenchcoat/sunglasses fashion sense, and combat style of using a gun in each hand in close quarters — often referred to as ‘Gun fu,’ was invented by, you guessed it: John Fucking Woo.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Bruce Li in Bruce Lee: The Man, the Myth (aka Bruce Lee: True Story) (1976)

Of the many pseudo-biographies of Bruce Lee starring lookalikes and imitators (Young Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee’s Deadly Kung Fu, Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story, etcetera etcetera), this one was probably the best. For a really cheap movie, it had a high-ish budget, shooting scenes in Los Angeles, Rome, and Seattle. I mean, the scenes set in these locations are pretty tacky - at one point, streetcar full of Americans waves at the camera, while we only ever see out heroes loiteringjust outside the 20th Century Fox studios. But sometimes you take what you can get.

Bruce Li (Ho Chung-tao) stars as Bruce Lee. We follow his rise to fame, his battles with racial prejudice, his blah blah and his blah blah. Mostly, we see him fight people. In Seattle, he fights some dudes who trash-talk him at a gas station. In San Francisco, he fights Japanese dudes who think karate is better than kung fu, and Chinese dudes who think he shouldn’t be teaching kung fu to white people. In an airport, he fights a squadron of dudes sent by… I dunno, a mobster? On the set of The Big Boss, he fights a challenger, and on the set of Enter the Dragon, he fights another challenger (played by Yuen Biao). On the set of Way of the Dragon in Rome, he fights another mafia goon. He fights…

In the final scene, Bruce Lee dies. But then the narrator says that many people believe his death was a cover-up, and they show us a couple of other possible scenarios, like Lee being killed by a bunch of gangsters, and Lee going into monk-like seclusion until the year 1983. I think it’s fair to say that at least one of these scenarios can now be ruled out.

This is a pretty stupid movie, where characters like Bruce Lee’s wife are addressed briefly in awkward scenes while everybody challenged Bruce Lee to fights like he’s in a Bruce Lee movie. So, all in all, worth seeing.

Fun fact: director Ng See-yuen is also the executive producer on the much-anticipated Wong Kar-wai martial arts film The Grandmasters! He also produced No Retreat, No Surrender, Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master, and directed Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. So there are some trivia questions answered for you right there.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Story of Ricky (AKA Riki-Oh) (1991)

The plot of this ludicrous Hong Kong action/splatter film is as follows: in the distant future year of 2001 AD, super-strong martial arts master Riki-Oh (Fan Siu-Wong) is sent to prison, where he runs afoul of four sinister gangs, and uncovers corruption in the jail administration. He fights back the only way he knows how: by punching his fist right through people’s bodies!!!!

One of the most joyously violent movies of all time, Story of Ricky keeps getting more and more ridiculous right up to its vomit-inducing climax (with, you’ll be happy to know, involves a meat-grinder). The sheer, exuberant excess of its cartoon ultraviolence makes it feel like the splatter-movie equivalent of a particularly brutal Road Runner cartoon.

Oh, and hey kids, the above clip is not for the faint of heart.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death (1975)

At the time of his death in 1973, Bruce Lee was midway through production of The Game of Death, and the uncompleted film’s holy-grail status led to several rip-offs based on what little plot was known - True Game of Death, Enter the Game of Death, and today’s subject, the early “Bruce Li” vehicle Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death. As with the aborted Lee film, Goodbye Bruce Lee centers around a martial artist  (Ho Chung-tao, AKA Bruce Li) in a yellow tracksuit fighting martial arts masters of various styles at each floor of a pagoda, video game-style.

Of the Game of Death knockoffs, this is probably the dullest… but it does have this supercool theme song, “(He’s the) King of Kung Fu.” Just try getting that crap out of your head.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Sammo Hung’s Enter the Fat Dragon (1978)

Forgive me if my memory of Enter the Fat Dragon is hazy. It’s a 1978 kung fu comedy starring that rotund rapscallion of the martial arts, Sammo Hung (key films: Project A, Eastern Condors, Spooky Encounters), which, if you know his work, should tell you what to expect. If memory serves, there’s a lot of lowbrow, skirt-chasing comedy, and a lot of scenes in which the great Sammo performs fights and stunts that one definitely does not normally associate with a man of his size.

It meanders all over the place, and one of the places it meanders is to the above scene, in which Sammo gets hired as a stuntman on a Bruceploitation movie. As faithful readers will recall, Bruceploitation was a subgenre that flourished after Bruce Lee’s death in which producers hired actors who looked vaguely similar to Lee, changed their names (to such brilliant aliases as Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce K.L. Lea, Dragon Lee, Bronson Lee, Bruce Thai, etcetera etcetera), and featured them in movies that poorly imitated the late star’s style. In this scene, Sammo punishes the Bruceploitation actors and filmmakers for their disrespect.

Enter the Fat Dragon gains additional interest from the fact that, pre-fame, Sammo fought Bruce Lee in the opening scene of Enter the Dragon.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury (A/K/A The Chinese Connection) (1972)

The story so far: Bruce Lee, a teen idol in low-budget Cantonese melodramas and soap operas, goes to America for college, then teach martial arts. After becoming the kung fu instructor to Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, and Roman Polanski (!), among others, he founds his own martial arts style (Jeet Koon Do), plays Kato for one season on The Green Hornet (1966-67), lands a few bit parts and guest appearances (notably as a villain in the James Garner film Marlowe), and then heads back to Hong Kong when work dries up. Also, somewhere in here he loses the lead role in the TV show Kung Fu to David Carradine, for reportedly Caucasian-related reasons. In Hong Kong, he makes The Big Boss, a tough and violent street-level martial arts film that becomes the territory’s biggest domestic box office hit up to that point. Less than a year later, he reunites with the less-than-visionary director Lo Wei for Fist of Fury, a substantially better and more financially successful film.

Lot of run-on sentences in there.

Fist of Fury is probably my second favourite of the canonical Bruce Lee movies, next to the immortal Enter the Dragon. That’s a pretty tepid compliment when you consider he only really made four, but it’s all kinds of fun. Lee plays Chen Zhen, a kung fu student from around the turn of the 20th century who becomes despondent when his master Huo Yuanji* dies under mysterious circumstances. Chen quickly realizes that his master was killed by Japanese colonialists, and so pretty soon, Chen is unleashes his “fist(s) of fury” on every Japanese person in sight.

Fist of Fury’s nationalist fervor gets on my nerves, and Chen Zhen is a pretty mopey and xenophobic character, and time has not exactly been kind to the film’s threadbare production values, but look: if ever there was a film that succeeded entirely because of one charismatic star turn, it’s this one. Going on and on about Bruce Lee’s badassedness probably will probably make me sound like one of those trench-coated guys who took all the shop classes in high school, but the man really did take bad-assery to new heights. Yes, he could fight, but he could also sneer and smolder and scream with the best of ‘em. Considering that he was a short, rail-thin man with a high-pitched voice who liked to wear bell-bottoms and call people “baby,” Bruce Lee’s sheer magnetic presence is really quite astonishing.

Fist of Fury remains Bruce Lee’s most beloved film in Hong Kong - it ranked #16 on the Hong Kong Film Awards’ list of the 100 best Chinese films (ahead of all but one of Wong Kar-wai’s movies, interestingly enough). Chen Zhen, a creation of this movie, has been revived in countless Chinese films and TV shows, most notably Jet Li’s Fist of Legend (1994) and Donnie Yen’s Legend of the Fist (2010).

Stray fact: the stuntman being kicked through a wall at the very end of the trailer is none other than a young Jackie Chan, who was also vanquished by Lee in Enter the Dragon.

*Huo Yuanji was a real historical figure/Chinese nationalist icon, whose exploits were heavily dramatized in Jet Li’s Fearless (2006).

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Sammo Hung’s Pantyhose Hero (1990)

In Pantyhose Hero, Sammo Hung and Alan Tam play undercover Hong Kong police officers who pose as gay to infiltrate the city’s gay community to catch a killer. Yes, it’s a kung fu comedy remake of William Friedkin’s Cruising, but even more tasteless. Like, for example, there’s a scene where a lady officer teaches our heroes how to act gay by making them wiggle their asses when they walk, etcetera etcetera. Far as I know, this has never received a DVD release (hmm, wonder why).

However, it’s kind of a shame this movie is so far to find, because as with any movie directed by and starring Sammo Hung (for the uninitiated: Jackie Chan’s Chinese opera brother, and the star of Project A, Spooky Encounters, Eastern Condors, and countless other classics), which means it has great fight scenes. Really, really great fight scenes. The kind of fight scenes that make you wonder how anybody could have survived filming. I mean, look at the above clip. Pretty great fight scene, right? Well, keep watching til the end, because it climaxes with Sammo Hung being hit by a moving car. I will repeat: Sammo Hung gets hit by a moving car.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Jackie Chan in Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992)

Quentin Tarantino included Police Story 3: Super Cop (released in America as simply Supercop in 1996) as one of his 20 favourite movies since 1992. Like most things Tarantino says and does, you need to take this with a grain of salt (the list also includes Speed, Friday, and that one Woody Allen movie with Jason Biggs), but in his usual hyperbolic way, he might be right when he says it includes the greatest stunt sequences in film history. This trailer (which definitely gives away too much) serves as a highlight reel, showing most of the best stunts from the spectacular final 20 minute action sequence. Jackie Chan dangles on a rope ladder above Hong Kong… Michelle Yeoh falls off a truck onto a moving car… Jackie Chan fights on a moving train… Michelle Yeoh rides a motorcycle onto the moving train!

Super Cop is also interesting for its modest political charge. The plot sees Hong Kong Inspector Chan Ka-kui (Chan) teaming up with a Mainland INTERPOL director (Yeoh) to stop a drug baron. Super Cop was made five years before Hong Kong’s reunification with the Mainland, during a period of intense political unease. If memory serves, the final line is something to the effect of, “Ah, don’t worry about it - after 1997 we’ll ALL be Chinese!” I don’t remember exactly what the context for this line was, but that’s the parting shot.

Look. I don’t wanna oversell this movie’s political dimensions, but they’re there.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Twin Dragons (1992)

Twin Dragons was commissioned as a benefit film for the Hong Kong Directors Guild, with all profits going to the building of a headquarters. It was never built, but we do have this movie, which is about as good as you might expect a movie made by people who were not receiving payment would be.

Twin Dragons is directed by two of the leading lights of the Hong Kong New Wave, Ringo Lam (Once Upon a Time in China, Peking Opera Blues) and Ringo Lam (City on Fire, Full Contact), and stars both Jackie Chan AND Jackie Chan. He plays twins, you see, separated at birth - you might even go so far as to call them twin dragons, because one of them is an auto mechanic with mad kung fu skills, and the other is a concert pianist/conductor who can become a kung fu expert thanks to a close psychic link with his brother. Also, when this was released in American in 1999 in a poorly dubbed version, the ads said that it starred “Jackie Chan and Jackie Chan.” I’ll leave it for you to guess which was the Garfunkle of the duo.

About 99% of Twin Dragons involves the twins being confused for each other, with varying comedic/kung fu-related consequences. It’s a lot like that one episode of The Flintstones where Fred Flintstone meets his doppelganger, and it’s a millionaire businessman in debt with the mob. At one point, auto mechanic Jackie sleeps with conductor Jackie’s girlfriend, but conductor Jackie sorta shrugs this off. The magical illusion of the two twin[ dragons]s talking to each other are achieved through some pretty hilarious 1992 Hong Kong special effects - the two Jackies always get a little fuzzy whenever they have to occupy the same plane, and there’s one part where auto mechanic Jackie seems to walk through conductor Jackie’s arm.

The 1999 version released by Dimension/Miramax is dubbed by Chan himself, which leads to a lot of awkward times when he tries to say things like “Do you feel it when I get laid?” in mangled English. Which is one reason why I highly recommend the 1999 remix.

Oh, also, Maggie Cheung is in this movie, and I think we can all agree this was her best film.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Jackie Chan week continues with arguably his best film, Police Story (1985), a cop movie Chan made in response to his failed bid for the hearts and minds of the American public, The Protector. Police Story contains a scene in which Chan clings onto an umbrella loosely attached to a moving bus; it also contains a scene in which Chan slides down a poll in a shopping mall, connecting to lights connected to real electrical sockets (the Hong Kong film industry is ridiculously dangerous, you see). In the latter stunt, Chan burned all the skin off his hands, which is one of those neat facts that tends to get printed on lists of his injuries.

Also, I read on IMDB that all the fake glass was actually 2x-strength candyglass, which basically means it wasn’t that far off from real glass.

In conclusion, I like this movie.