Hitch Magazine | Tough Guys of Kung Fu

Dragon on Fire

(1980)

***

Wacky kung fu. Shaolin strike rock fist. A fat guy sticks dishes to his boobies. Tree kicking. Whole frog soup. Attack on a parakeet. Rabid cannibal in a wheelchair. Man pisses himself. Villain tracks fights with a sand timer. Mad dog technique. Reverse-motion crawling in the grass. Slow-motion milk spurting. The hairiest toes you’ve ever seen. Who’s who? Who knows, who cares.

Golden Dragon Silver Snake

(1980)

***

Dragon Lee also headlines the fun, colorful Godfrey Ho-direction run-on Golden Dragon Silver Snake, in which everyone is at the mercy of a motorcycle gang whose members wear skinny ties and answer to a cat-throwing crime lord. There’s a semi-ingenious fight involving a guitar and a trick net hat, but that’s all topped by a 15-minute fight sequence late in the game that begins at a hotel pool, moves to a playground, then atop moving boats!

Plus, there’s egg fu, wheel fu, sandbag fu, electric drill fu and raft fu thrown in here and there. But the best part is when some old guy walks into a trap of spikes. Inexplicably, the guy synching the soundtrack breaks in several times to say things like, “Okay, coming to end of segment one. Out and back in on double-B, standby,” followed by a series of beeps. For some reason, I didn’t mind it being there.

The Killing Machine

(1976)

****

The Killing Machine is a postwar Sonny Chiba vehicle with heavy political overtones that nonetheless manages to kick serious ass. Disillusioned and pissed off after his country surrenders to America in World War II, wartime spy Chiba returns home to Japan to find he doesn’t like what he sees with all the riff-raff running rampant and engaging in crime.

Because he can beat up anyone, Chiba resolves to righting wrongs, and there are plenty of wrongs to right, mostly in the form of black marketers and gang members. To demonstrate the extremes to which he’ll go, Chiba takes revenge for a friend’s rape by cutting off the perp’s penis with scissors and feeding it to a dog! Outside of his Street Fighter films, this may be his best.

Rage of the Dragon

(1979)

Judging from what’s onscreen, the Rage of this Dragon is rather tame. Dragon Lee sets out to avenge his father’s death, with a trusty assistant by his side who sports an enormous brown growth on his nose that is never explained. Dragon fights several baddies, including a team of masked swordsmen and a freaky-faced dude that looks like something out of Dick Tracy. There are too many characters and if you can figure out who’s who and what’s what, you win a prize – and that prize is watching a better kung-fu movie.

Ninja Turf

(1985)

From “Action Brothers Productions” comes Ninja Turf, a turf-war movie featuring exactly as many ninjas as Casablanca or King Kong. Take your pick.

Basically, the nice new Chinese kid in school who wears the same diamond-patterned sweater through the whole movie isn’t well-liked by the resident tough-guy gang. But luckily, he finds a quick ally in the school’s other Asian student, albeit one with a mustache who looks 42 years old. But hey, he can fight with sticks.

So it’s like every other below-average warring gang movie, except that this one involves gratuitous amounts of cocaine, breakdancing and Bill “Superfoot” Wallace. Even ugly skank Brinke Stevens shows up for a few nauseating minutes of breast-rubbing in the bubble bath. Worst of all, the soundtrack was recorded entirely in post-production and each song somehow sounds like El DeBarge and Jan Hammer at the same time.

Deadly Kick

(1986)

*****

Here’s the greatest Sonny Chiba film Sonny Chiba never made. Lo Lieh directs and stars in this over-the-top, modern-day Street Fighter-esque fight film as an alcoholic loser with a wispy mustache. His name sounds like Marion, so we’ll just call him that. As the movie begins, he’s drowning his sorrows in drink after discovering his wife turning tricks with a black guy. When he sees her being roughed up by who I presume are her pimps, he holds up his hands like they’re monster claws and starts doing all sorts of animal-style kung fu, complete with sound effects and quick cuts to the animals – tiger, eagle and snakes – going apeshit on human flesh.

Through a flashback, we learn why Marion is so fucked-up: He fought his rival for the hand of their karate teacher’s daughter in marriage, and lost. Naturally, he responds by raping her … and then poking out her eyes immediately after orgasm! Back in the present day, the violence continues, with a man losing his forearm to a ninja star and another man burning to death in a flaming car. A semblance of a plot forms, involving $10 million, a nuclear bomb and a gray-haired kingpin in a gold lamé suit who has an underground headquarters accessible via mine shaft.

Plot schmot – Marion’s too busy making it with his new girlfriend. At one point he even sniffs the panties she’s just removed and says, “Smells better than whiskey!” There is so much up-close lip-mashing that there’s no doubt Lieh was in the director’s chair. One frame-filling sequence even has him milking her nipple without using his hands, and he refers himself as “king of the nether regions.”

But they get into trouble, too, finding themselves chained to his-and-her guillotines. They’re saved by Marion’s rival, for reasons not well explained but not necessary for your enjoyment of the film. In fact, the complete ludicrousness of this illogic enhances it. Together, the three of them get into more trouble, most notably as their car is chased by a helicopter with grenade-dropping goons and a guy with an automatic weapon who squeezes the trigger as if it were a 10-cent watergun.

To further complicate things, the woman Marion violated and blinded comes back after five years to settle the score. She’s been practicing kung fu with the help of a little girl who jumps around with bells on a string as some sort of code to let her know what’s what and where. Marion doesn’t like getting his ass kicked by a blind chick, so he kills the little girl! Meanwhile, Marion’s true love is tied up naked in the bad guy’s lair, being whipped and vagina-sworded all to the laughing delight of a dinner party. Marion busts in, pulls out an adversary’s intestines, throws them in the face of another and then chokes him with it! Then, rather anticlimactically, he pushes the head villain through a wall, which leaves an exact outline of the poor old guy, arms in flailing position and all.

With all the bad guys dead, Marion and his rival have to settle their festering differences, which is where the weirdo supernatural leaf-blowing aspects of the film come into play. Marion learns why the movie is called Deadly Kick. Then they go snow sledding.

Fists of Bruce Lee

(1978)

***

The bad guys in Fists of Bruce Lee don’t seem all that threatening, what with their pink telephone and idling time playing bumper pool. But the woods outside their hideout are a different story, booby-trapped with sandbags, pitchforks, rope and logs!

We’re introduced to our hero – Brucesploitation star Bruce Li – via a credit sequence in which he, wearing a blindfold, spars with another guy wearing a girdle, while Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces” blares. The film is produced by Woo Ka Chi, which also accurately describes the music score.

Li meets an effeminate guy with a name like Poochie Chan, who wears a white suit and continuously dabs at his face with a handkerchief. Li also falls for a woman who has a doll in her room that shoots metal darts out its head. How all these characters come into play with the story is a moot point, because there is no story. They simply amble amount and speak in generic terms and, every few minutes, a fight breaks out. One colorful brawl takes place at night at an amusement park; another on a playground, predating a similar scene in Jackie Chan’s Police Story 2, except Jackie’s scene didn’t steal John Barry’s 007 musical cues, nor did it have a preceding foot chase scored to Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die.”

One guy gets shot with an arrow by a dude who looks like either the construction worker or the motorcycle rider from the Village People. Some random minion gets a pitchfork deep in his ass. Story schmory, slightly snory.

Tattoo Connection

(1978)

***

Several rungs below Enter the Dragon, Jim Kelly continues his screen descent as a man recruited by the CIA to investigate the theft of a diamond in Hong Kong. Doesn’t the CIA have anything better to do?

With his Fisher-Price Afro, Kelly puts raw eggs in his liquor and is constantly referred to by the various Asians as “that black guy.” (And he sounds like he was dubbed by a white guy.) The fight scenes are fun, even if frames clearly were excised to speed Kelly’s moves up; I also liked the aptly named Fat Dog character fighting off two guys while one arm is in a cast. A whore does several hoochie-coochie dances.

Millitant Eagle

(1974)

Yes, this kung-fu movie actually misspells its own title. The gaff is appropriate, because even this film has no idea what’s going on. From what a gathered in the opening scene, some people fight with swords and then a guy is granted permission to leave the imperial army. After that, your guess is as good as mine.

So fast-forward toward the end, where several kids with slingshots make life difficult for a bearded ogre with a spiked club. They shot down a bee’s nest so it falls on his head. His face swells up like mad, he gets his eyes stung out and, thus, stumbles off the cliffside and dies. Kids do the darndest things!