Ten Tigers of Kwangtung ( 1979 ) A century before there was The Avengers or a Justice League, there was The Ten Tigers of Canton. It was China's ten greatest heroes of the decade who banned together to form a society which used their martial arts abilities to upholding justice. But unlike the Marvel and D.C. superheroes, all Ten Tigers actually existed. Although the bit about them fighting crime and tyranny may have been embellished through folk legend, and the Tigers may have been no more than an exclusive club for the top martial arts masters. Some of the more prominent members were Wong Kei Ying, father of Wong Fei Hung, and Beggar So, a.k.a. The Drunken Master.
It wasn't until 1978 that any film featuring The Ten Tigers was made. Perhaps because producers lost interest when they realized any Ten Tiger story would take place before Wong Fei Hung was born. In 78
Ten Tigers of Shaolin was released, followed a few months later with Jackie Chan's
Drunken Master which establish that Wong Fei Hung's father was friends with Beggar So, sending the teenage Fei Hung to him to study Drunken Style Kung Fu. With renewed interest in the Ten Tigers, Chang Cheh decided to make his own film, with an all star cast of Shaw Brothers actors. This included the Venom Mob, which made this one of the more prominent Shaw Brothers films. But is it a classic?
Well, no. Clocking in at only 30 minutes, it has the appearance of being an even shorter film padded out with a second plot that takes place years in the future. The film opens with two villains who are stalking and killing the children of the Ten Tigers of Kwangtung. ( And just so you don't get confused about the title, Canton was renamed Guangdong in the 20th Century, the alternative English spelling of is Kwangtung. ) Realizing they are being picked off by relatives of a villain that the Ten Tigers killed, the remaining offspring began talking to each other about how their fathers first met. This leads to flashbacks, which look a lot like an excuse to use footage from an earlier abandoned incomplete film. The leader of a failed revolution against the Qing Dynasty is on the run from a Qing general and his troops tasked with arresting him. He is rescued by a martial arts master and hidden in a secret room in the pawn shop he owns. The master decides to seek the aid of five other martial arts masters in the region who are also anti-Qing so they can help the rebel leader escape from Kwangtung. Meanwhile, the owner of a rival pawn shop has noticed the other masters showing up at odd times of the night. So he tells the Qing general that he suspects they may know where the fugitive is, and comes up with a plan to stop them. He finds four other martial arts masters who he tells he wants to finance a school run by them. He then manipulates them into attacking the other four masters, claiming they are helping a fugitive criminal who is guilty of burning down his house and murdering his wife. So the masters all end up fighting, but then after seeing the fugitive is actually the rebel leader, realize they have been duped. They all ban together as the Ten Tigers and vow to get the fugitive safely on a boat out of Kwangtung. However, the general is waiting at the docks for them with his men. There is a fight, and the general ends up dead. Moving back to twenty years in the future, the son and close friend of the General are now taking revenge by killing the children of the Ten Tigers. After a few more deaths, the remaining two offspring lure the villains into a trap and fight them both. The villains soon appear to have the upper hand when out of nowhere one of the Ten Tigers shows up and easily kills the villains.
I have to give the film credit. Despite a plot of the offspring of the Ten Tigers being stalked for revenge, Chang Cheh resists having Wong Fei Hung as one of the children. This certainly would have robbed the spotlight from the Ten Tigers. But the film does appear to be an incomplete Ten Tigers film completed with the 20 years later revenge plot. The rival pawn broker tells the four masters he will finance their own school, but you never actually see that happen. Nor do you see any scene explaining how he is able to get two of the masters to attack his rival's pawn shop midway through the film. It appears as if key scenes that explain character motivation were never filmed. The scenes with the revenge plot feel like a different and cheaper film, even though they include some of the movie's best fight scenes. It is not a bad movie. It just doesn't live up to it's hype, and despite it's all star cast, comes off as a potboiler.
Which brings us to the reason I wanted to watch this movie this week, and ended up looking through every single box of DVDs I own to find it. ( I really should get those boxes organized. ) Last week I saw a Shaw Brothers film that turned a sedan chair into a weapon. The writers at Shaw Brothers have come up with dozens of ingenious martial arts weapons over the years. But not the one in this film. It happens during the fight between the Qing general and the leader of the Ten Tigers. The Qing general gestures to his man to bring over weapon, and.... Well, just see for yourself...
Not only is this statue ineffective as a weapon, but the Ten Tiger master easily turns it against the Qing general, using it to bash his skull in while he is still holding it. I have no idea what Chang Cheh was thinking when he came up with this as a weapon. Also, when I first bought this DVD, I was with a friend who insisted on watching the English dub. Every other time I had seen this film, it was the English dub version. This time around I decided to watch it in it's original language with the subtitles turned on. And I discovered this mistake made by Media Blasters when they created the subtitles. It should be a character accused of colluding with the Qings saying "What are you talking about?", but instead this happens...
I chose this film knowing I would have a good laugh with the statue fight. But this mistake in the subtitles was an unexpected bonus.
Black Scorpion ( 1995 )As I grow closer to completing my superhero movie collection, I am now getting to the films I held off on buying for financial reasons. These were either out of print, released directly to members of a club, or released by a small independent video company which made them impossible to find. In other words, the ones that either had their price jacked up on Amazon, or cost a lot on eBay, and most likely I would need to settle for a used copy. I held back hoping they would get a rerelease or would be put out on a different lable. With the first two Black Scorpion films, I was hoping like some of the other Roger Corman 90s films that they would be released as a double feature. No such luck. The first film is still available for a reasonable price of $20, but the sequel cost me nearly $50. Did I say these are Roger Corman direct to video films?
Here is what I liked about
Black Scorpion. The 60 second origin. Most superhero films spend a great deal of time between when the hero gets his powers until when he first puts on his costume. In this film, after nearly 30 minutes of being a normal police drama, suspended police detective Darcy Walker ( Joan Serverance ) out of nowhere decides to make a superhero costume an continue fighting crime as a vigilante. It only takes about a minute between when Darcy finds out a pimp has beaten a prostitute the police were suppose to be protecting, and when she is wearing the Black Scorpion costume. The 60 seconds being a montage showing her making the costume. She doesn't have any powers, although a little later in the film, after looking at a taser, she does somehow invent a ring that shoots electricity and allow her to levitate. And a little later the owner of a chop shop who owes her a favor ( Garrett Morris ) builds her a Scorpion Mobile using technology found in a car someone stole from the Army. But the actual origin takes less than a minute. So while there is a half hour before the actual superhero film starts, we don't have to sit through the rest of the film waiting for the hero to finally put on a costume.
Another thing I liked, this film had a costumed villain who had a scheme to destroy the city. The trend in superhero films seems to be to do away with costumed villains, or even reinvent villains from the comic books to be more realistic. The whole point of a comic book movie is it's source material. If I wanted normal then I would watch a regular crime drama.
Now, what I didn't like about the film. Roger Corman produced it. So basically it was made quickly and on the cheap. Like most Corman films, it is right there on the line between bad and good. They could have done a much better job on this film, but didn't. You don't hate it or grow board watching it, but you also don't feel thrilled watching it. It simply exists just to exist. Just so Corman could sell Showtime a superhero film that legally qualified as a superhero film. On that front, Corman and his company New Concord produces much better films than their rival Asylum, and a faaaaaaaaaar better job than TomCat. It is as if Corman is willing to spend the money to produce a film that doesn't suck, but refuses to pay a penny more.
Tunnel ( 2002 )Normally these off weeks for
Saturday Night Live would be used to watch a WC Fields film. But with the extra $'s being spent on eBay to complete the superhero collection, it may be some time before I can buy what films are still left. So this week I am getting around to watching something someone gave me for Christmas, presumably picked out of a bargain video bin on the checkout line at Walmart.
Tunnel is an action thriller set in a tunnel, starring Daniel Baldwin, who also directed the film. Rotten Tomatoes calls it a movie, and nothing else since no one seems to have reviewed it. It currently has a score of __. It is currently one of the few things you can't find on Wikipedia.
The film opens with an armored car robbery. Police detective Daniel Baldwin and his partner show up to foil the heist, during which his partner is shot dead. While this is never mentioned in the film, I am pretty sure the partner was only a day away from retirement. While a female robber gets away with the loot, the leader of the robber gang is subdued by Baldwin. They decide to transport the robber by train to a jail and Baldwin decides to tag along. Armed men working for the robber climb aboard the train and hijack it,. Among them is the girl from the robbery, who turns out to be the girlfriend of the robber that got caught. And she has brought the stolen diamonds with her. It is stopped in a tunnel after which both ends are blown up so there is no way in or out. Baldwin escapes from the train and goes into John McClane mode. He discovers there is a side tunnel that leads to an abandoned power station that the criminals are breaking into. They plan to escape via the power station, and on their way out, set off a bomb in the tunnel that will collapse the mountain above the train, permanently burying it. The scheme, that everyone will think the robber was killed with the rest of the train passengers in the collapse. So basically Baldwin has to stop the armed criminals and retrieve the remote detonator from them before they can blow the mountain up.
Lets set aside that this is another
Die Hard rip-off that is nothing but formula, or that they allowed Daniel Baldwin to direct, or that Baldwin's character is basically the poor man's Casey Ryback. ( That's the Steven Segal character from
Under Siege. ) On top of that all the film suffers from a low budget. How did the mercenaries working for the robber get onto the roof of a moving train? Who knows, because apparently there was no budget to shoot it. You hear the sound of explosions instead of seeing the explosions that caused both ends of the tunnel to collapse. Nor do you actually see the debris that blocks both ends of the tunnel. Instead Baldwin's character somehow knows the explosions were the sound of both ends of the tunnel being blown up. He sends a female passenger to inspect the ends of the tunnel to confirm his theory. She walks away, then later comes back and says that both ends of the tunnel are indeed blocked. The producers couldn't even afford to build fake boulders to show the end of a tunnel blocked. Even the helicopter that is suppose to rendezvous with the robbers is only a sound effect. They didn't even have enough money to hire a helicopter to film hovering above the power station. Nor do we ever see the exterior of this power station. They also had little choice but to keep as few takes in the film as possible. There are a few scenes where the female lead almost breaks into laughter, and you can see her trying not to smile. In most films that take would have been rejected, and the scene reshot without the actress smiling. Especially in the ones where the criminals are trying to kill her, or Baldwin is disarming a bomb she is standing next to. It is an action film that is basically not thrilling. But to Baldwin's credit, it is not really a bad film other than being a pointless rip-off that can't even afford to be a rip-off.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1582162 times)
