The Bells of Death

MORE SHAW BROTHERS ON REGION 1

Another series of culls from the library, on plain vanilla discs without much in the way of extras, is coming from the U.S. company Image Entertainment, with another basketful due soon from Media Blasters. The Image titles are mostly second-tier stuff, though they did manage to snag a personal favorite, Yueh Fung's The Bells of Death, a wuxia swordplay variation on the Harold Robbins Western Nevada Smith. (The film elides the standard boy-meets-sifu training sequences with an elegant visual metaphor: a dissolve jumps over the whole process, and then the boy walks away wearing his master's clothes.) The Media Blasters list has been cherry-picked more shrewdly. It even includes a couple of crucial works by genre master Lau Kar-leung, Challenge of the Masters (1976) and Martial Club (1981), in which Lau re-thinks the legend of Cantonese folkhero Wong Fei-hong. Media Blasters also has the inestimable advantage of the participation of dauntingly knowledgeable kung fu movie superfan Linn Haynes, who can be counted on to deliver informative Special Features.

CHENG CHANG-HO

The director of King Boxer, Cheng Chang-ho, was a veteran South Korean action specialist with more than thirty films to his credit when he moved to Hong Kong in the late 1960s, to work first for Shaw Brothers and then Golden Harvest. He came with an already fully developed and innovative approach to shooting action that made sparing use of slow and fast motions and of wide-angle lenses, to heighten the "3D" impact of blows often aimed straight at the camera — anything to jack up the sense of immediacy and impact. Many of these devices later became staples of the Hong Kong–cinema action-movie style, and it's hard to resist the thought that the future superstars he worked with, such as Sammo Hung on Broken Oath, may have picked up a few tricks from him.

His first big film for Shaw Brothers, Temptress of a Thousand Faces (Qian Mian Mo Nu, 1969), was high-impact in a different sense, a '60s high-camp thriller about two female mistresses of disguise whose Bond-lite hideouts are full of purple smoke. (It has been pretty conclusively demonstrated online, in a a side-by-side comparison, that Temptress was a gender-flipped almost shot-for-shot remake of the 1964 French film Fantomas. Chang's best work in Chinese includes Six Assassins (Leu Ci Ke, 1971), a superior wuxia swordplay film with echoes of the Japanese 47 Ronin story (loyal retainers pursue revenge for their lord in violation of an imperial edict), the classic Angela Mao head-banger Broken Oath (Po Jie, 1977), a period kung fu film closely based on the Japanese manga-to-movie series Lady Snowblood, a key influence on Kill Bill.

Chang's notorious, ultra-violent wuxia film Heads for Sale (Nu Xia Mai Ren Tou, 1969), which Tarantino endorses on the King Boxer track, is scheduled for Region 3 DVD release from Celestial/IVL in October.

Dynamite Warrior

RECENT RELEASES

A Century of Light and Shadow, a two-disc, seven-episode history of Chinese-language cinema from Hong Kong's RTHK TV.

Perils of the Sentimental Swordsman, the third film in director Chor Yuen's classic wuxia film series, with the great Ti Lung in the title role.

Dynamite Warrior,, a new Elbows of Fury action film from Thailand, now the one Asian movie industry whose no-holds-barred enthusiasm truly recalls Hong Kong in the 1980s. This title looks a bit like Sammo's gonzo Shanghai Express. Read Premiere's review of Dynamite Warrior.

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, a high-energy Bollywood song and dance with world-class production values. Pure pleasure.

Aap Kaa Surroor, the Hindi hit of the year so far. Top film-song bellower Himesh Reshammiya becomes a movie star.

Soo, a brutal Korean revenge thriller, perfect for the "Asia Extreme" action fan on your holiday list.

The Host, a critically acclaimed Korean monster movie. It's a long way from the rubbery old Yonggary. Read Glenn Kenny's review of The Host on DVD.