Recommend Martial Arts Movies

Lau Kar-leung is secondary in Mad Monkey Kung Fu but it must be one of his most prominent roles

Did anyone else see Bare-Footed Kid? What did Ti Lung mean when he said "I can only do this once" and proceeds to smash up the sides of buildings?

I generally don't pay attention to age ratings on films but what on earth did Yes Madam and Magnificent Warriors do to get an 18 when Mercenaries From Hong Kong gets a 15?! Magnificent Warriors is close to Spielberg violence and it's more clearly modelled on Indiana Jones than Armor Of God or Operation Condor. There's some very dangerous fire stunts and Michelle Yeoh swore it would be her last action film.

Mercenaries From Hong Kong looks like a mid 70s film a lot of the time but it's 1982. I recently heard someone point out that Five Element Ninjas and Duel To The Death came out the same year (though most databases say the latter is 1983) but they look like they could be a decade apart. Somebody should write a paper on why some Shaw Brothers films look way older than they actually are.

I don't think it's purely my personal fondness for Yuen Biao but he seems to be in generally better films than everybody else.

I mean... isn't it clearly the super cheap budgets and reused costumes and sets? (And I love Five Element Ninjas!)

I don't think it's just that. Mercenaries doesn't do either of those things and it must have had a much bigger budget

I also like Five Element Ninjas and Mercenaries From Hong Kong is pretty decent too. But I don't think I'll be getting the next Shawscope set, I'm reluctant unless they packed it with high wuxia, Intimate Confessions and some horror surprises. I'm burning out on them and I'm still 8 films to go on Shawscope 2.

Really happy about the announcement of Burning Paradise and cautiously hopeful about Mr Vampire sequels box. Fingers crossed for Swordsman 1-3, Fire Dragon, Tiger On The Beat 1-2, Executioners, Scorpion King, more girl group films and the Tsui Hark, Yuen Woo Ping, John Woo highlights that haven't been released yet and more goodies I haven't heard of.

Nhex - did you see this?
https://cityonfire.com/tiger-cage-trilogy-blu-ray-shout-factory/

Just heard! I was even thinking about importing the 88 Films Region B version (after getting a player...), which frankly had nicer cover art. But yeah, I'll probably get that. Someone told me only the first TC was really worthwhile, though.

Nonononono, the whole trilogy is solid, some of my favorite martial arts films of the last few years. I imagine the second film is the fan favorite.

In the booklet to Royal Warriors the writer points out how post Police Story the Hong Kong film industry had to adapt to new conditions practically overnight, including for instance things like car chases that previously had been pretty much not a thing. Makes perfect sense to me that relatively "underdog" studios would be able to ride these new conditions better than a big fish like Shaw that had an established system of how to make films focused mainly on studio sets.

I wonder if the dudes from Mercenaries From Hong Kong ever met the baddies from Royal Warriors.

Shawscope Vol2 is down to £100 at the moment.

I knew I was taking a risk with a Jackie Chan film after 1995 but Gorgeous is really terrible. The last fight is decent and Shu Qi has one of the greatest smiles of all time but it has almost nothing else going for it.

lol agreed about Shu Qi

Twin Dragons from the early 90s is coming soon and I haven't heard much about it, hope it's worth the time.

An odd trend I've noticed in the 80s and 90s films is for characters having the same first name as the actor, but some films have characters with the exact same full name as the actor: Donnie Yen plays a cop called Donnie Yen in In The Line Of Duty 4!

Michiko Nishiwaki plays a terrorist called Michiko Nishiwaki in In The Line Of Duty 3 and has a surprising fuck scene that is like something from a CAT III film. She had a small part in Everthing Everywhere All At Once but I never spotted her.

I believe Gorgeous is a Lunar New Year film and from what I've heard those work with a very different logic from your usual action fare - they are entirely meant for local audiences and as such make no concessions to foreign taste in terms of their comedy and sentimentality. Also meant for the whole family, so not as action-focused.

It really did feel like a kids movie

I had heard Mr Vampire 2 is awful and it mostly is despite all the talent involved. Not without merit but mostly bad.

Burning Paradise was great, was surprised to hear it was such a huge flop. Sleeve notes guess it was just too dark and violent (arguably a horror film) for such a big film even with the jokes quite jarringly lightening the tone. Might watch the commentary someday to find out more about this. I knew this was an all-timer for some HK action fans and I think it's fair to call it a must see if you like this kind of thing.

Duly noted! Was curious when VS put it out, but I have this in-built cynicism for post-'95 HK. Should give it a chance and some of the other titles they've put out over the last year.

It was 1994. I think it was mainland actors, I wonder if it was harder for them to make such an extreme film?

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/23745639/roundup-no-way-out-movie-review-ma-dong-seok-don-lee

I saw a poster advertising this outside a Korean restaurant the other day, doesn't often happen that you get this kind of grassroots advertising for Korean cinema, at least not in London.

it's playing at one of the theatres near me and it looks delicious

Oh I CANNOT wait for this to leave the festival circuit so I can see it.

https://gizmodo.com/enter-the-clones-of-bruce-lee-trailer-exclusive-debut-1850519638

My own favorite from this madness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-YSu810hFA

yeahhh i don't get this subject

Not a movie, but season 3 of the TV show Warrior is coming at the end of the month and if you've never seen it, you should catch up now, because it rules.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89dEEKEzglw

yeahhh i don't get this subject

I dunno, it's a decent in for an analysis of the many fly by night independent operators out of Hong Kong in the 70's, you can tie in the beginning of Jackie Chan's career, etc. Bruce Li has actually made some pretty great films, I watched The Iron Dragon Strikes Back and that's a crazy downbeat 70's film with so much footage of Hong Kong previous to its shiny 80's iteration, really worth watching.

The Severin brucesploitation box set that'll come with it tho is, as far as I've heard, one to avoid. Very boring selection of films apparently.

No Way Out was ok. Didn't go as balls out as I wanted, leaned more into comedy. Really no martial arts though, mostly conventional boxing/fighting techniques. Movie is devoid of guns, though, like MA films

I had heard Mr Vampire 2 is awful and it mostly is despite all the talent involved. Not without merit but mostly bad.

Man, we have different criteria for what we want out of our hopping vampire comedies. This has so much amazing slapstick acrobatics! That insane prolonged fight with everyone affected by the slowing serum. An amazing DO YOU SEE scene about Hong Kong bureaucracy featuring the police, the morgue and a museum squabbling over who gets to keep the vampire corpses. Small kids mistaking a hopping vampire kid for a refugee and befriending him, complete with montage set to a musical number about how great it is to have a vampire friend! Vamps hopping in rhythm over police vehicles! Great film, pure cinema.

Mr Vampire III is slightly less stellar (also, zero vampires), but worth it if you like your gory Boxer's Omen type stuff.

Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995) is one of the most transcendent pieces of filmic art that I have ever seen. Very fortunate to have experienced it in 35mm some years ago

i am definitely a fan of brucesploitation films... yes they can be terrible (the less said about _bruce lee vs. gay power_ the better), but as noted above, Ho Chung-tao, aka Bruce Li, was worth watching in his own right - _The Chinese Stuntman_, for which he was billed under his own name, is excellent. I've also heard good things about _Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth_, but I haven't seen it yet. and ok, it's maybe not great cinema, but some of the stranger brucesploitation films are...

Other films used his death as a plot element such as The Clones of Bruce Lee (where clones of Bruce Lee portrayed by some of the above actors are created by scientists) or The Dragon Lives Again (where Bruce Lee fights fictional characters such as James Bond, Clint Eastwood and Dracula in Hell and finds allies amongst others such as Popeye and Kwai Chang Caine).

it was interesting reading up on this to learn that brucesploitation started while bruce was still alive... it makes sense, just like the genre of "what if the nazis won world war ii" started, uh, during world war ii. a filipino man named Ramon Zamora was apparently the first bruce lee clone!

oh, also, the director of that brucesploitation film, david "WRONG DUDE" gregory seems like an interesting fellow:

David Gregory is one of the international DVD industry's most in-demand Bonus Features providers. He has produced and directed more than 130 "making of" documentaries on films as diverse as Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Wicker Man, The Deer Hunter, Faster Pussycat, Don't Look Now, Heathers and Repulsion. As co-founder of the UK/US DVD labels Blue Underground and Severin, he has produced many of the industry's most widely acclaimed discs and collections, including The Final Countdown, The Alan Clarke Collection and The Mondo Cane Collection, which includes his feature-length documentary The Godfathers of Mondo.

Mr Vampire III is slightly less stellar (also, zero vampires), but worth it if you like your gory Boxer's Omen type stuff.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 29 June 2023 11:23 (two days ago)

I liked this more, more of an action film and the shrieking warrior woman was good. Occasionally she reminded me of Chronicles Of The Ghost Cat/Haunted Castle, the Japanese film.

Magic Cop is pretty good. Very elaborate magic battle scenes, if you have some fatigue of those from 80s films, don't worry, this is a real step up. Michiko Nishikawa is very cool in it.

Any opinions on Blue Jean Monster and Last Hero In China? I haven't heard of them.

Just watched She Shoots Straight and its a shame Joyce Godenzi didn't make more films like this. She's a Jehovah's witness and said she regrets some of her films, partly because some featured "demonism", don't know what that means.

Finished the Mr Vampire set (which features 2-4 and a spinoff, the series is actually bigger than this), I think the 3rd and 4th film's were the better ones but I didn't love any of them. But the 4th was quite creative with the slapstick. The last film was probably the worst and seeing a little bat's face wincing while being squeezed hard was more unpleasant for me than the snake and chicken deaths I've seen in hk films.

Difficult to pin down what counts as the series, since there's no continuity and personnel also varies. There's a by all accounts terrible Mr.Vampire 1992, and the last one in the set wasn't released as a Mr.Vampire film originally.

Important Cinema Club did an episode on these recently and they mentioned there's some dour hopping vampire film from the 00's (I think?) that's not any good but does have the novelty factor of having a lot of the iconic actors from the series play down on their luck slobs in an apartment complex.

are these martial arts films? I suppose. I've sung 2's praises before but the long scene where everyone pretends to be in slow motion is Buster Keaton-worthy.

they mentioned there's some dour hopping vampire film from the 00's (I think?) that's not any good but does have the novelty factor of having a lot of the iconic actors from the series play down on their luck slobs in an apartment complex.

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, 24 October 2023 10:25 (yesterday)

That's Rigor Mortis and its generally considered good, I enjoyed it, a bit cgi heavy but not boring, worth a try for sure. The guy with the glasses from Mr Vampire 1 and 4 is in it and he hadn't been in movies since the early 90s. Kara Wai is good in it too.

I expected that the Mr Vampire box set would have one of the two The Gods Must Be Crazy crossovers, but neither is there. One of the stranger crossovers I've heard of, The Gods Must Be Crazy series was a big hit in Hong Kong, I tried the first film and I didn't get far, I found it extremely patronizing.

Guy with the glasses is Anthony Chan Yau, he directed a film called My Americanized Wife, I've always found HK films quite funny when they portray Chinese people from America or England.
https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/9L3hkB0vor8Yk8yGDTRFhuSd0dP.jpg

lol amazed both by the fact you thought they'd include a The Gods Must Be Crazy crossover and your generous assesment of it as "extremely patronizing"; just a total garbage franchise, omnipresent for a few years in my childhood.

I thought that was the 4th and 5th film in the series. I watched like 20mins of The Gods Must Be Crazy before I turned it off. That might be the earliest I've abandoned a film that I sought out (on streaming admittedly). I had never heard of it until I read an hk horror film guide.

I confused TGMBC with the George Burns "Oh, God" movies and was very confused for five minutes

i gotta say i really loved watching this essay... anybody have any recommendations along these lines?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-tQUzZTVCw

Inspector Wears Skirts was kind of okay but the poetry line "why do my hairy legs always walk towards you?" was inspired. Kara Wai looks glorious with that hair.

I didn't even finish Beach Of The War Gods but was amused how the trailer boasts about having an all-male cast. I thought the novelty value of male action heroes would have worn off by the early 70s.

Beach Of The War Gods rules. Hilariously ends with our intrepid heroes doing a war crime.

Can any of the heads or here help me out?
Years ago (mid 90s?) I saw a kung fu flick (a hisorical setting) where the hero had a secret technique, but every time he used it, he got more feminine... it was mostly played for laughs, and by the end of the film his part was played by a woman...
Can't remember the name... any ideas?

at first i thought it was Clan of the White Lotus, but Gordon Liu's character was never played by a female at the end

...that's not it, but that's a good one..

ppl on a different forum suggest Swordsman II?